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Tattletale stirred. I could see the usual confusion that went with waking up in unfamiliar surroundings. She adjusted faster than most. There was no flailing about for a point of reference so everything could start to make sense again. Her power supplied it.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I replied.

“Think the world’s going to end today?” she asked, as she stretched, still lying down.

“I mean, I think some of it was for my benefit, but it didn’t fit like that was the be-all and end-all of the singing. She was doing something else.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. But she’s not exactly an easy one to get. Who knows what she sees? Maybe she’s singing for a reason that isn’t apparent yet?”

That was unsettling. I thought of what the Simurgh had said.

It didn’t serve to keep secrets right now. It’d be disastrous in the worst case scenario, and Tattletale was the best person to go to when I needed answers. “She apologized.”

“The Simurgh?” Tattletale asked. She gave me a funny look.

“Believe it or not. She said ‘I’m sorry’.”

“She doesn’t talk,” Tattletale said.

“I know. But I heard it.”

“Anyways, she isn’t sorry,” Tattletale said. “I’d put money on it. I’ve got a lot of money to put on it, if anyone’s willing to take the bet. Couple million in liquid assets.”

I shook my head. “I won’t take that bet. Look, just keep it in mind.”

“Filed away,” Tattletale promised.

“For now though, we should mobilize,” I said, as if I could distract myself. “Get everyone on the same page, start putting heads and powers together.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tattletale responded. She pulled off a glove, then reached into her belt to get a small tin from one pouch. “Two minutes to get myself presentable. Could do with a shower, but I think people are a little past that right now.”

I nodded. Most of the capes I’d seen were just a little rougher around the edges. The shine gone from their costumes, a little dustier, their hair greasier, chins unshaven. Psychologically, it was much the same.

This had hit all of us hard. I liked to think I was rolling with it better than some, if only because I’d had two years to anticipate it. Then again, I was good at self-delusion.

I thought about Clockblocker, his optimism. When I’d been talking about expecting the worst, he’d argued for the opposite. I didn’t want to diminish what I felt about him being dead in the general sense by thinking about something so petty, but a part of me was disappointed I couldn’t talk to him now, after the fact, and see how he was doing. If he was coping better than I had.

It wasn’t that I was coping, exactly. I wasn’t happy, confident or unafraid. The only thing I could say was that I’d been able to brace myself. I’d bought into Dinah’s prophecy more than just about anyone else. I’d braced myself and I’d nearly broken, regardless. I could tell myself that the point where I’d been floating over the ocean by New Brockton Bay had only been a desire to get away, nothing darker, but I wasn’t sure I was telling myself the truth. I could think back to the point where I’d snapped after being cut in half by Scion and tell myself I was lucid, but I wasn’t sure that was true either.

Hard to say I’d held my own when I wasn’t sure how much of it was me and how much was the adrenaline at work. Or other things.

Any opinion, passenger? I asked. We’re going up against your maker. You going to hold back or are you going to go all-out?

No response, of course.

Tattletale was smearing black greasepaint around her eyes. She’d finished the hardest part, around the eyelashes, and spoke up as she filled the rest in, “You get in touch with everyone you wanted to talk to?”

“Almost everyone.”

“Ah. I can guess who you didn’t actively look for. This denial worries me.”

I shrugged.

“No use dwelling on it. Your decision in the end. Let’s move on to a happier topic. You ever think we’d make it this far?”

“To the end of the world?” That’s a happier topic?

“To the top of the heap. As far up there as we could hope to be.”

“We’re not big leaguers, Tattletale. Not the most powerful capes out there.”

“But we’re talked about around the world. We’re on speaking terms with some of the biggest and scariest motherfuckers out there.” Tattletale gestured towards the window. Towards the Simurgh. “We’d be front page news, if the news still existed.”

“I’m not sure being news would be a good thing,” I said. “Which isn’t to say word isn’t getting around, you know. Charlotte knew.”

“Charlotte’s connected to Sierra and the rest of our infrastructure in Gimel. That doesn’t really surprise me,” Tattletale said. She pulled her hair out of the loose ponytail she’d had it in, then combed her fingers through it to get it more or less straight. It still had kinks and waves where it had been braided. Something she would have fixed before going out in costume in more ordinary circumstances, for caution’s sake.

“Mm,” I acknowledged her. Maybe I was tired. My thoughts were wandering some.

“I tried to set things up so we’d have some way of maintaining communications and getting some information in, getting information out. Like, I told people about what you said about Scion hating duplication powers. Anyways, only the very high tech and very low tech have really survived. Satellites and hard copies.” She lifted one of the files I’d stacked on the floor, as if to give evidence to the point. “Reading up?”

I picked up a file as well, leafing through it. “I wasn’t sleeping, so while you were out, I got in touch with Defiant and one of your minions, arranged for only the most essential status updates to come in on paper. I figured I could update you after you got up. The deliveries stopped a good bit ago, but one of the last status updates was about Dragon, so I guess she’s handling her old duties while Defiant recuperates from the last few days.”

“Guess so,” Tattletale said. I turned my head to see what she was doing, but she was already crossing the room.

“Doormaker is napping as well, I guess,” I said. “He just decided to leave one open, and he hasn’t been responding. I double checked the portal, making sure he wasn’t trying to tip us off to anything important, but it opens to a pretty remote area of Earth Bet.”

“There’re lots of capes who don’t sleep. About a year ago, I started digging into the PRT files. Hired the Red Hands to steal a more up to date set, even. I was looking into clues for understanding this whole thing, y’know? Best leads at the time were memories and dreams. Clues popping up here and there, relating to people’s dreams, or gaps in memories. Dreaming differently, seeing things instead of dreaming, case fifty-threes suffering from their amnesia… Well, there are a number of ‘Noctis’ cases. Named after a vigilante hero that was up at all hours. The opposite of what I was looking for, but a good data point anyways: capes who don’t dream because they don’t sleep. PRT confirmed a few members of their own, Miss Militia included, as examples. Others have only been marked down as guesses. Doormaker and Contessa were among them, they said, going by the times the ‘bogeyman’ was showing up.”

“So if he doesn’t sleep, why leave a door open and ignore us?” Tattletale asked.

I shook my head a little.

“Doorway,” Tattletale tried.

There was no response. No portal, no door.

“Door? Portal? Open sesame?” I tried.

“That’s worrisome,” Tattletale said, keeping her voice low. She clipped on her belt, tapping each of the pockets, as if to check the contents were still there. She drew her gun and checked it for bullets.

“We should go,” I said.

“We’re definitely going,” Tattletale said, but she didn’t budge as she double-checked her gun, pulling the slide back. I resisted the urge to comment on just how useless a gun was, considering what we were up against; I could remember how she’d fared when the assassin targeted her, Accord and Chevalier.

There were other threats.

“Right,” Tattletale said, finally finishing, grabbing her laptop and tucking it under one arm.

That was our go signal. We broke into stride.

We passed a soldier, and Tattletale signaled him, raising a finger. He stopped and wheeled around, following.

“We’re going,” Tattletale said. “Ship up, move out. If we come back and settle in here, then so be it, but let’s not plan on it.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Get someone to collect my things. All the files, the computers, the food. Everything. Get it all to the far side of the little doorway…” Tattletale looked at me. “Where’s the doorway?”

“A bit outside the front doors,” I said.

“What she said,” Tattletale told her mercenary. “If we’re gone, just hold position. If we’re still gone after twenty four hours, assume we’re dead. Get my data and the backups of my notes to someone who matters, then consider the job done, collect your payment, go on your merry way.”

“I’ll make sure everyone’s informed.”

“Do,” she said. Then, as if to offset the curt command, she added, “Thanks, Tug.”

He gave us a sloppy salute as he broke away, turning down a different corridor.

I had my phone out before I was outside. My bugs let me navigate the stairs without taking my eyes from the screen, as I input commands. It was cold out, almost cold enough it would impair my bugs, and a heavy fog hung in the open clearing. The stout military building stood in an open, overgrown grassland, encircled by evergreen trees.

No reception. Not a surprise, but inconvenient. I watched as we got closer to the portal Doormaker had left open.

Tattletale, for her part, turned around, walking backwards as we reached the bottom of the steps. With the phone still dark, I took a moment to look in the same direction. I was treated to the intimidating image of the Simurgh passing over the building. She moved as if she were as light as a feather, but I knew that wasn’t true. She was heavier than she looked, by a considerable margin. Had she set her full weight on the roof, she would plunge through.

Like someone playing hopscotch on the moon, the Simurgh set one foot down on the roof, hopping forward, set another foot on the very edge and pushed herself off. She floated down to the space beside the portal, then unfolded her wings, drawing the halo out to its full breadth. The movements sent swirls of dust and fog rippling across the edges of the clearing, stopping only as they crashed into the line of trees.

“She changed the guns?” I observed.

“She did,” Tattletale observed, “Cosmetic changes.”

Each of the Simurgh’s guns had been streamlined, the outer casings, barrels and handles reworked into wings. Three concentric circles of interconnected guns, all redesigned to appear like an extension of her own wings, behind her.

“Why cosmetic?”

“Way I understand it, she needs to have a tinker in her sphere of influence to borrow their schematics, or a specific device, if she wants to copy it. Thinkers, too, I think she borrows their perception powers as long as she’s tapped into them. Might be why she’s attached to me. Either way, she didn’t have schematics or anything she’d need to modify the guns.”

“Or she can modify them, and it’s a card she’s been keeping up her sleeve for the last while. I mean, it was only three years ago or whatever that she really showed off her ability to copy a tinker’s work wholesale.”

Tattletale nodded. She frowned. “I don’t like being in the dark. But that’s the gist of it. She made cosmetic changes because she couldn’t make concrete ones.”

“Well, it’s unnerving to think about, but anything about the Simurgh is,” I commented. “When I asked about the aesthetics, though, I wasn’t asking about the why so much as the…”

“So much as the why?” Tattletale asked, emphasizing the word.

“Yeah,” I said, lamely. “Why does she care?”

“Why does she have feathers and wings? For all intents and purposes, she could be a crystal that floats here and there. The end result is pretty much the same. A few less weapons. Behemoth? I mean, you saw what he was, when we reduced him to a bare skeleton. All the extra flesh, it’s decorative. He doesn’t really need any particular parts, except legs to move around.”

“It’s there to dress them up so they make better terror weapons,” I said.

Going through, I thought. Hopefully there’s people on the other side that can’t read me like a book.

My phone lit up as a connection was established to a satellite.

A moment later, the connection was secured.

The clock changed, followed by a time zone and a symbol. Four forty-six, Eastern standard time, Earth Bet.

I stared at the world that stretched out before us, and it was wrong. Perspective was skewed. Lines bent where they should have been straight, and the expanse to our left was somehow more extensive than the space to our right.

The horizon should have been straight, or at least a gentle curve to accomodate the planet’s natural curvature, but it was almost a wavy line.

“The fuck?” I muttered.

“Vista,” Tattletale said, very matter-of-factly.

The Simurgh reached the portal. I was reminded of Leviathan breaking into the shelter beneath the library as I saw her put one hand on each side of the portal. She wasn’t quite as large as he was, until you added up the wings and wingspan. Put all the wings together, and her mass was probably equivalent to her older brother’s.

She passed through with little effort, dropping almost to her knees to get her head through. The wings followed, each wing stretched all the way behind her. The feathers rasped against the boundaries of the portal as she floated forward.

The outer edges wavered a fraction, as if the stress threatened to bring the portal down entirely.

Then she was through. She flexed her wings, then folded them around herself. The halo came through in pieces.

The Dragonfly made its way to us, stopping no less than four times. With each stop, it descended to the ground and refused all incoming commands. A minute would pass, and then it would take off again.

It took me a bit to realize why.

Vista. The autopilot didn’t seem to like her power.

“Just how much area is she manipulating?” I asked.

“She was only ever held back by the Manton effect,” Tattletale said. “Number of people in the area.”

“And there’s not many people left in Bet,” I spoke my thoughts aloud, as I made the connection.

“Consider it a bonus,” Tattletale said, raising her head as the Dragonfly came into view, “In a sad, not-really-a-bonus sort of way. Empty earth makes for a convenient battleground. If we’re able to fight here, that is.”

The Dragonfly set down, the ramp opening before it was even on terra firma.

It took a minute to plot out the route the Dragonfly should take, looking at what the cameras had tracked, seeing where the distortions were.

“Something’s really wrong,” Tattletale said.

“With the distortions?”

“The distortions are a band-aid. Vista’s trying to fix something that’s gotten fucked up,” she said. “How do you plot the course?”

I mapped out a course to take us to the Gimel portal.

Tattletale changed the course, adjusting it to match the distortions we’d mapped and some we hadn’t.

It took several minutes, all in all, but the resulting trip was fast. The Dragonfly’s onboard system kept trying to calculating the remaining time for the trip based on our location, only to get tripped up by the folded and pinched space.

Then we hit Silkroad’s power, and accelerated to nearly three times the speed. Tattletale was caught off guard, standing beside my chair, and fell, dropping her laptop onto the hard floor.

Both the distortion and Silkroad’s power stopped when we were a distance from the portal. The effect was disorienting.

Corridors of folded space with the dim pink corridors of Silkroad’s power stretched out in every direction. Connecting points.

Towers surrounded Brockton Bay, set on mountaintops and high ground within the city itself. It necessitated a careful approach. As we passed between two, I saw that they were communication towers, crafted to put satellite dishes at high points rather than provide shelter.

The craft settled down, and we climbed out. They’d finished the ramp leading up to the portal, and it was easy enough to make our way up. I opted to walk beside Tattletale instead of use up my jetpack’s fuel.

Twelve percent capacity remaining. An hour or two of flight.

Vista stood at the top of the platform, on our side of the portal. A Chinese woman in an elaborate Sari-style dress stood beside her, as did a man I recognized as the Knave of Hearts from the Suits. Others were nearby, but seemed less like part of the group and more like bystanders. Kid Win was sitting at the edge of the platform, tools and a gun in his lap, abandoned as he stared at the Simurgh.

The Knave of Hearts muttered something in what I was guessing was Dutch. Louder, he commented, “They weren’t joking.”

“What happened?” I asked, the second we had their attention.

“Cauldron’s running with their tail between their legs,” Vista said. “Big promises, excuses about having all the power and being the only ones who can really put the screws to Scion, and then they run at the last minute.”

“Let us not be hasty,” the Knave of Hearts said. “It is possible Scion hit their headquarters. We won’t know until we have more information.”

“We can’t get information,” Vista said. “Because they never gave us a better way of getting in contact, and they never told us where their headquarters are.”

“Yes,” Knave said. He looked at me. “We have no portals but the ones that were left open. We cannot communicate by opening a door and talking to the other person. Vista, Silk Road and I are attempting to patch together an answer.”

“A workaround,” Vista said.

“Fast transportation between key areas,” Tattletale observed. “Your power and Silk Road’s to make the corridors…”

“I am handling communication and pinpointing the other portal locations,” Knave said. “The Hearts of the Suits have good relations with other teams and places.”

“I can give you the coordinates,” Tattletale said.

“We have the coordinates,” Knave said, sounding annoyed. “All but the concealed portals.”

“I think I know where those are,” Tattletale said.

Knave looked even more annoyed at that, but he nodded. “Step through, talk to the guys at the station, they’ll get you set up. We’ll handle the ones we know about while we wait.”

The station was on the other side of the portal. A way to keep the civilians from trying to go back to Bet to loot and getting themselves killed or stranded, and a place where they could organize things.

Tattletale and I both gave up our phones. The technicians on the other end changed settings to bring them on board with the hodgepodge arrays they’d put up on both Bet and Gimel.

Tattletale reclaimed her phone, then paged through the contents, checking settings. When she was satisfied, she looked at me. “I don’t expect you to hang around while I’m doing the geek thing and pointing those guys to the right places.”

I nodded. “I’ll see how the others are doing and get back to you.”

Getting the Endbringers on board had marked the point we’d stopped reeling and started preparing again. I could see the results. The Gimel settlement was swiftly transforming from a sprawling refugee camp to a standing ground. Refugees were being escorted or transported to other locations, packing up tents and possessions and climbing into trucks and helicopters. It made room for the capes that were here.

Miss Militia was at the center of it, giving orders, managing the capes and the civilians in charge.

Squads were organized, many from the Protectorate, not in rank and file, but clustering according to their respective teams or organization. Here and there, they’d gathered in more specialized groups.

I could see Rachel, Imp, Foil and Parian with the Chicago Wards, sitting or lying on the closed bins that held supplies for the settlement. Only Golem was absent.

I felt a moment’s trepidation. I had doubts, regrets, even a kind of shame, when it came to the Chicago teams.

I’d said it out loud, but I’d never really faced the decision I’d made: giving up on being a hero.

Still, I found myself walking up to them.

“Here she is,” Grace said. “Make your way here okay, Weaver?”

“Doormaker left a door open for us,” I said.

“He left doors open for everyone,” Tecton said. “But navigation’s a little tricky. Can’t always make it from point A to point B.”

“We did okay,” I said. “Vista was saying this is a cut and run on Cauldron’s part, but I can’t imagine this as something malicious or cowardly. They wouldn’t have left the portals here if it was.”

“I agree,” Tecton said.

“Who’s looking into it?” I asked.

“Satyr and the other ex-Vegas capes,” Grace replied.

“Isn’t that like sending the fucking fox to guard the henhouse?” Romp asked. “Except it’s sending the confusing mind-game head-fuckers to answer the confusing, fucked-up riddle?”

“I can stand her, and it took a long time to get that far. That’s all it is,” Rachel said.

“But you asked. Like, for the first time ever.”

“I have a question for her. That’s all.”

Romp looked at her teammates, turning to Grace, then Tecton. “Am I the only one who hears these guys talk and wonders how the fuck they ever got to be in charge of a city?”

“Don’t fucking swear,” Grace said, saying the line as if it were reflexive by now. Romp looked annoyed, but Cuff smiled, and I could see Tecton looking away, as if he was forgetting that people couldn’t see his face while he had the helmet on. I, too, smiled. Romp was completely unware about why it was funny that Grace was admonishing her on the swearing.

I turned to Rachel, “What’s the question? Something I can help with?”

She shrugged. “This dork with Miss Militia was telling me some tinker was wanting to try something with my power. Give my dog some drug shit a rat made? I didn’t follow, and he kept talking to me like I have brain damage, which I don’t, so I didn’t listen.”

“Which made the guy step it up even more,” Imp commented. “Until it sounded like he was talking to a five year old.”

“I walked away,” Rachel said.

“Stuff a rat made?” I asked.

“Lab Rat,” Imp said.

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “Her power burns up toxins and chemicals in the dog’s systems.”

“I said that when they said they wanted to use drugs,” Rachel said.

“They know that already,” Imp said. “They wanted to try anyways. Have some things left over from the previous fight.

Dosing mutated dogs with Lab Rat’s leftover transformation serums?

Would the gains be additive?

“The drugs they’re talking about are the only reason I’m still here,” I said. “Honestly, I’m seeing only two outcomes. Three, maybe: the effects stack up and Rachel’s dog gets even tougher or more versatile; the dog ceases to be a dog while the serum’s active and Rachel’s power stops working; or it’s made for humans and not dogs, and we get a negative reaction.”

“Two out of three odds,” Romp said.

“Actually,” Tecton said, “Nothing’s guaranteeing that the odds of any result are even. Could be a ten percent chance of the first, five percent chance of the second and an eighty-five percent chance of the last one.”

Tecton sat up straighter. “Hey. Just because I’m not your team leader anymore-”

“-You’re totally not the one who gets to order me around,” Romp replied. “Deal with it.”

“Run a lap,” Grace said, her voice quiet.

Romp turned around, eyebrows raised.

“A lap?”

“Two laps,” Grace said, her voice quiet, cold and dangerous. “For not moving the second I gave the order.”

“What am I supposed to fucking run around?”

“Three laps for swearing, four because you’re still here. We can do five if you don’t move now. Start running, and if you don’t pick a big enough area to run around, I can give you another few laps.”

“This is balls,” Romp said, hopping down from the bin’s lid.

“Five laps, then,” Grace said.

“I know I’m getting more laps by talking, but I needed to state the truth for the record.” She kept talking, speaking with each footfall. “Balls, balls, balls.”

The moment she was out of earshot, Grace and the others broke into laughter. Foil was the only member of the Undersiders who seemed to get it, her shoulders shaking in silent laughter.

“I can’t believe she actually went,” Cuff said.

“Don’t let her exhaust herself,” Tecton said.

Grace shook her head, still smiling. “I’ll stop her after she finishes the first lap.”

“Okay, I need something to write on,” Imp said. “Anyone?”

“Here,” I said, getting a notepad from my belt. I handed it to her. “Why?”

She handed the notepad to Tecton. “So Tecton can write something down. And I hold it up, like a cue card, and Rachel recites it, sounding like a genius, and we blow dr. baby-talk’s mind. And if he turns around, I use my power, so he’s never the wiser.”

They continued, Imp leaning forward and kicking her legs where they dangled from the edge of the bin.

Grace interrupted my observations. “You’re wearing black.”

I felt a bit of guilt welling. No, guilt wasn’t the right word. I was at peace with my decision.

I just felt a little ashamed that I hadn’t been more upfront about it, with the people I’d spent years working with.

“Yeah.”

“I suppose you’re not going to get around to having that meeting with the PRT guys, getting yourself moved up from the Wards to the Protectorate? Unless I’m reading too much into the costume choice.”

“You’re not,” I said. “No, I suppose I’m not going to have that meeting.”

“Is it that we failed with the Jack thing?”

“That’s not the entirety of it,” I said.

“But it’s part of it, right? Isn’t that unfair? We had, like, a four percent chance of success going in, and we didn’t stop it from coming to pass, so you bail?”

“I said it’s only part of it,” I repeated myself.

“I know,” she said. I could see Tecton and Rachel pause, catching something in Grace’s tone.

When Grace and I remained silent, they resumed. “…the cross species interactions…”

“…the cross species interactions.”

“I know,” Grace said, after a pause. “I get that. I get that there’s other reasons. Like the fact that you love those guys and you never loved us. Cool. Makes sense.”

“I liked you guys.”

“But you didn’t love us.”

“No,” I said.

“I get all that. But Golem’s pulling away too, and I know that’s because that we had only that fucking four percent chance and we failed. So I draw a connection, think maybe you’re more bothered about that than you let on.”

I looked at Cuff, who was watching me intently. She looked even more intent and focused than Grace did.

Then again, she was a little more invested in how Golem was doing than most.

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

“It’s shitty,” she said. “Both Golem and you, drifting away.”

“I know, and it feels shitty,” I said.

“Then that’s consolation enough, for me,” Grace said. She relaxed a little, then glanced at Cuff.

“I’m not really the type to nurse grudges,” Cuff said. “I just want Golem thinking straight again. He took it hard. So you’ll get my forgiveness if you go talk to him.”

“I think that’s something I can do,” I answered her.

She smiled. “He’s at the phone bank, near the station, if you want to find him.”

Now?

But Cuff was smiling, looking so intent.

Weaponized niceness.

“Right,” I said. I turned to go.

And I could see people moving, running.

I felt a pit swell in my stomach.

“No,” Imp said, following my line of sight. She could see squads getting into formation. In the distance, the aircraft that had been moving refugees were turning around, coming back to us. “No, no. We had such a good joke going, don’t you dare ruin it.”

Romp returned to us, breaking into a run to close the remainder of the distance. “Someone’s saying he’s hitting Samech. It’s one of the Earths Cauldron was going to watch over. There’s only Dragon, the Guild and some Protectorate guys there.”

“Let’s move,” I said. “Through the portal. We’ll use the Dragonfly. Faster than waiting for another ship. Rachel, look for doctor baby-talk, if we can grab something from him before we leave, great, but let’s not dawdle.”

There were nods all around.

I could see the other heroes. Miss Militia and Glaistig Uaine. Revel and Exalt. Protectorate teams, sub-teams of the Suits, including the non-combat teams of the Hearts and Cups.

People hurried to organize, pulling on costume pieces they’d left off and checking weapons, clearing out of the open spaces where shadows grew as the aircraft descended.

One by one, the ships began to take off, flying through the tall, narrow portal.

Three ships, then four.

But the fifth didn’t take off. I reached out with my swarm, trying to catch what people were talking about, to make sense of the situation, but everyone important was already on a ship.

King of Hearts was the only person of any meaningful rank who spoke the same language I did and who wasn’t mobilizing to leave. The leader of the Meisters, Vornehm, was giving orders in German. A scary-looking Master class cape with an army of clay men carrying tinker weapons was ordering other people around with the same harsh voice he was commanding his own troops.

As confusion descended, people started falling back into their previous state, gathering in clusters of familiar people. It almost seemed like we were the only group with direction, pushing against a milling crowd. We weren’t, but the illusion was there.

And that same effect made it possible to see when the crowd did find direction, a common, mutual interest. Heads turned, chins raised. People found postures where their feet were set apart, as if ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Scion. Here. Floating above the bay like he’d floated above the ocean in his first appearance.

He’s targeting us, I realized. Two of our organized settlements in as many minutes?

His hands hung at his sides. The golden light that radiated from him cleaned his clothes and hair, but there was enough blood on his costume that the light wasn’t rendering it as pristine as it should. His eye sockets were dark, with the way his forehead blocked the sun’s light. That same sunlight made the edges of his hair and body glow with the light that wasn’t completely blocked.

He didn’t even raise his hand before he fired. Lights no bigger than basketballs streaked forward, leaving trails glittering behind them.

Two of Dragon’s ships detonated violently. Occupants dead or grievously injured, people in the area of the craft wounded by the fallout.

By the time I’d turned my head to see his follow-up, Scion had closed the distance, moving right into our midst.

Capes with reflexes better than mine were already reacting, throwing a multitude of effects in his way. He plunged through the defenses like they weren’t even there.

Something got in his way, but he flew around it without a second thought. He stopped right in front of a cape. Quite possibly the cape that had stalled him momentarily. A dark-skinned man in gray.

A swirling gray effect swelled between him and the target. He struck it with a glowing hand, and the effect distorted, growing thin. Another strike, and the effect dissipated.

Other capes were hurling effects at him. Most glanced off.

He caught his target around the throat. Didn’t squeeze.

But the golden light began to eat into the target’s body and costume. Scion let the man drop.

Not a scream. Only twitching, frantic thrashing as the golden light continued to consume.

Foil raised her arbalest. I could see our entire group tense as she raised it, Parian’s hands going to her mouth.

A moment later, Parian’s cloth was unfurling from behind her back. Rachel was making her dogs grow, while Cuff was manipulating a shotput into a blade like the one from a circular saw.

For my part, I began drawing the bugs into decoys, sending them into the air.

Oblivious to it all, Foil took aim, then ran her hand along the bolt she’d loaded in place.

I could see her draw in a breath. I’d taken marksmanship classes. Squeeze the trigger as you exhale.

The shot flew through the air.

Scion wheeled around and caught it.

It wasn’t just his costume, I could see. All the lines of his body, his hands, lines that made it so he didn’t look wholly artificial, they were filled with the detritus of smoke and blood and other grit, and the golden light had only washed the surface clean. The deepest cracks held the remainder. It made fine lines look more like crags.

I was almost glad that it took away from his human appearance.

He let the arbalest’s bolt drop to the ground.

His eyes were on Foil.

A golden light swelled in his hand.

We spread out, but Foil didn’t even flinch. Even as Cuff backed away, Foil reached out to touch the sawblade, imbuing it with power.

Scion reached out, and Parian used her power, encircling Foil with the end of a length of cloth. Not an animal, only an arm.

In the instant Scion loosed the bolt of light, Parian flung Foil away. Not a simple throw, but a reckless, inhumanly strong one.

Foil was removed from the battle. Sent beyond what would have been the outskirts of the city, if we were in Bet, cast out in the direction of the Bay itself, until she was only a speck.

The bolt hit ground, fifty or sixty feet behind us. Other people died instead. People I didn’t know.

No longer interested in Foil, Scion turned to the nearest cape, lunging.

Cuff threw her circular blade. Without even looking, Scion batted it aside, striking an unaffected part towards the middle. His attention was on a cape, and he swiped a glowing hand through the cape’s abdomen.

What didn’t burn spilled forth. His screams were joined by that of a friend, another cape who screamed in horror over what had happened to him. Scion very deliberately walked past this other cape to attack someone else.

Picking us off, choosing targets.

Maximizing pain and suffering over raw destruction.

Experimenting.

And there was precious little we could do about it.

Precious little I could do about it. My bugs formed into more decoys. Other bugs searched for the key players. Where was the man Rachel had described? The one with the serums? Where was Miss Milita?

The Simurgh was passing through the portal, and people who’d been trying to flee to Earth Bet were now scattering, trying to flee both the Endbringer and Scion at the same time.

Horribly timed, as entrances went. Our best hope was that he’d keep toying with us, that enough time would pass that capes stationed at the other major portals could use the fast-travel routes to get to us.

The news came through the earbuds, and it was like a shockwave rippled through our assembled ranks. Some of the strongest of us dropped to their knees, staggered, or planted their feet further apart as though they were bracing against a physical impact.

The one Azazel that was still in the area landed atop one of Bohu’s buildings, nearly falling as a section slid off to drop to the empty street below. It found its footing and roosted there.

The pilot couldn’t fly, and the A.I. wasn’t willing or able to take over.

The other capes were talking, shouting, asking questions, sometimes to nobody in particular. With the blood churning in my ears, I couldn’t make out the words. I’d used my bugs to find Hookwolf’s core, but they’d been decimated twice over in the process, and I wasn’t interested in trying to use them to figure out what was being said.

I could guess.

I raised my arms, then found myself unsure what to do with them. Hug them against my body? Hit something? Reach out to someone?

I let my hands drop to my sides.

I opened my mouth to speak, to shout, to cry out, swear at the overcast sky above us.

Then I shut it.

There were no words. Anything I could do or say felt insignificant in the grand scheme of it all. I could have used every bug in the city to utter something, something meaningful or crude, and it still would have felt petty.

I looked at the others. Clockblocker was with Kid Win and Vista, Crucible and Toggle were nearby, on the back of a PRT van, bandaged. They were looking over their shoulders at the screen mounted on the wall of the van. Footage, covering ruined landscapes, and what had used to be the United Kingdom.

Parian and Foil were hugging. Odd, to see Foil hunched over, leaning on Parian for support, her forehead resting at the corner of Parian’s neck and shoulder. The crossbow had fallen to the ground, forgotten.

I wanted something like that. To have a team close, to hold someone. I hadn’t had something like that in a good while.

Chevalier was a distance away, his cannonblade plunged into the ground so he didn’t need to hold it, a phone to his ear. He was talking, giving orders, and demanding information.

Revel was stock still, not far from him. I watched as she stepped back, leaning against a wall, then let herself slide down until she was sitting on the street. She placed her head in her hands.

I’d never known her to show any weakness. She’d always been on the ball, always the leader. I knew how much concussions sucked, and I’d seen her carry on and contribute to the Behemoth fight when she was reeling from one.

It hit me harder than I might have expected, to see that.

Tecton was standing a distance away, almost frozen, his eyes on the screen of his armband. Golem did the same, but he wasn’t still. He paced, looking around for guidance and finding none, then turned back to the screen, watching.

Glancing at the images from a distance, I could see the figure, the speck visible on the long range camera, surrounded by a golden nimbus.

I wasn’t close enough to make out details. Only staccato flares of golden-white light. On the third, the screens fizzled, showing only brief gray static, then darkness.

Another target hit. He’d taken his time on that one, measured the attacks.

I took out my earbud before the report could come in. Not my focus right now.

Instead, I reached for my phone. I dialed the Dragonfly.

Would the A.I. be able to cope? Saint had apparently pulled something.

If there was any hint he fucked us here, he’d pay for it.

The phone responded with a message. An ETA.

My eyes turned to Rachel. She was more agitated than Golem, her attention on her dogs. She used a knife to cut away the excess flesh and retrieve the animals from the placenta-like sacs within their bodies, and the actions were aggressive, vicious, savage. Her expression was neutral, but I could see the way the muscles shifted in her back, beneath the sleeveless t-shirt she wore, the tension, the way she was hunched over.

The attitude fit the Bitch I’d been introduced to, way back when I’d first joined the Undersiders, not the Rachel I’d come to know, who’d found a kind of peace.

Angry, defensive, bewildered. Scared of a world she didn’t comprehend. Aggressiveness was the default, the go-to route when there weren’t any answers.

It dawned on me. I sympathized. Given a chance, given something to do in that same vein, hacking through dead meat with a knife for some defined purpose, I might have acted exactly the same way.

She flinched as I approached, as if I were invading her personal space. When she turned and glanced at me out of the corner of one eye, glowering, the tension faded.

I drew my own knife and started helping. Bugs flowed into the gap and gave me a sense of where the sac was. I was able to cut without risking cutting the dog inside. It helped that my knife was sharp.

We were both sweating by the time we finished. Rachel had already been sweating from more physical exertion, and her hair was stuck to her shoulders at the ends. The German Shepherd got free, walked a polite distance away and then shook herself dry.

I looked at my phone, my gray gloves crimson with the dog’s blood. There were incoming messages. Updates on the damage, the disaster, and on Scion’s current location.

I ignored them, looking for the Dragonfly’s status.

Minutes away. It had already been headed into the area by default, tracking me by my GPS, ready to maintain a constant distance until I was prepared to call for it.

That was fine. I started walking down the length of the street, my back to the others, to the Azazels and the heroes. Rachel fell into step just a bit behind me, her dogs and Bastard accompanying us.

Parian and Foil were still hugging. I paused as we passed them, tried to think of how to word the invitation.

Parian’s eyes weren’t visible, hidden behind the lenses on the white porcelain mask she wore. I hadn’t thought she was looking at me, but she shook her head a little.

Good. Easier. I left them behind.

The Dragonfly started to land in an open area, an intersection of two streets. Moments later, the ground began to crumble. The craft shifted position, coming perilously close to striking a building as it avoided falling into the hole that had appeared in the street. A trap.

Rachel boarded the craft. As I waited for the dogs and Bastard to join us, I looked into the pit. As deep as a six or seven story building was tall.

I turned away, boarding the Dragonfly. I plotted a course, then took manual control of the craft.

The A.I. was better at flying than I was, but flying meant I didn’t have to think. Didn’t have to worry about what I was about to find out.

Rachel didn’t seat herself at the bench along the wall, or even at the chair behind mine. She sat down beside me, on the floor of the Dragonfly, her back against the side of my seat, the side of my leg, staring out the narrow side window. It was physical contact, reassurance, seeking that same reassurance from me. Her dogs settled on either side of her, Bastard resting his head on her lap.

We had the whole country to cross. Every few minutes brought more visuals, more reminders of what had occurred. Highways grew choked with cars. Countless vehicles had stopped at the sides of roads, at the edges of fields and at the fringes of small towns.

Innumerable people running, seeking escape. Except there wasn’t anyplace good to escape to.

No. That wasn’t true. There was.

But the degree of the damage done was becoming clear. Before we even reached the East coast, I could see the damage done to the landscape. Smoke was only just settling around the cracks and fissures, fallen bridges and ruined highways. People were making concerted attempts to move, to leave, but every step of the way brought more difficulties, more forced detours. Some had abandoned cars altogether, wading or swimming across rivers to make their way.

Every step of the trip revealed more devastation, successively more vehicles choking roads and highways, forging paths around impassable roads. More and more people were forging ahead on foot, in crowds, because walking was faster than travel by car.

More helicopters, marked with red crosses, had taken to the skies. Travel by ambulance wasn’t doable.

This was one place. One moment’s attack. The display in the cockpit was showing more locations hit. Libya, Russia, France, Sweden, Iran, Russia again, China…

Time passed. Forty-five minutes from the point in time I started paying attention to the clock, searching for a yardstick to try to track the scale of what I was seeing on the surface. How much worse did things get in five more minutes of traveling? In ten? It all seemed to get exponentially worse as the Dragonfly took flight. It wasn’t just that we were getting closer to the point where the attack had hit. Enough time had passed that people could react, now, realizing just how severe this was. All of the power of Behemoth, mobility almost on par with Khonsu.

The psychological toll of a Simurgh attack.

These were the people with a strategy. Doing just what I’d be doing if I were one of the unpowered. The world was doomed, so they sought to flee to another world. Problem was, there were tens of millions of them, and the escape routes were scarce at best.

The best known escape route: Brockton Bay.

I felt my heart sink as we approached the coast. Mountains I’d grown up with weren’t there. I let the autopilot take over as we got closer, approaching an airspace choked by rescue aircraft.

I didn’t trust my own hands.

It had collapsed. The blast had only struck the northern edge of Brockton Bay, then changed orientation, striking through the bay itself to slice through the very foundation the city sat on. Everything had been dropped a solid thirty or forty feet. Tall buildings had collapsed and only the squatter, sturdier structures and those fortunate enough to come to rest against other buildings were still mostly erect.

Folding and collapsing, the entire city had been shattered, no section of the ground more than twenty-five feet across remained fully intact. The landscape rose and fell like waves, petrified and left frozen in time.

The portal tower had fallen, but the portal remained there, oddly bright, too high to reach on foot. Work crews were struggling to erect something beneath, so the civilians could finish their journeys. The new arrivals were alternately joining in with the construction and making their way inside by way of rope ladders.

Elsewhere, there were capes and rescue crews trying to contain the fallout around the scar. A structure had been raised to seal it off, but the collapse of the city had released the contents. A lot of containment foam was being deployed to slow the spread of a pale patch of earth, and there was one spot of fire that didn’t seem to be going out.

But the most eye-catching thing was a thin, scintillating forcefield that was holding off the water. It was taller than any building that had stood in the city, an artificial dam. Every few minutes, it flickered for a tenth of a second, and water would flood through to seep into the gaps and fissures. In time, I suspected, the water would cover everything in the area but the tallest buildings and the hills. Arcadia High might stick around. Maybe.

I recognized the rainbow hues. It was the same force field that had been intended to protect the Protectorate headquarters. Leviathan had torn the structure apart at the roots, and the tidal wave had knocked it into the city proper. In the time since I’d left, they’d repurposed the fallen structure and the forcefield setup.

Not, apparently, to try to block Scion’s attack. No. This was more to stop the water, to break that initial wave, so it wouldn’t simply sweep the ruins out to sea.

I could only hope they’d done similar things elsewhere, to minimize the damage.

We circled the city twice before I gave the go-ahead for the A.I. to start descending.

My second sense extended through the area as we approached the ground, extending out to the bugs that were scattered throughout the ruined, shattered city. I immediately set them to work, searching, scanning, investigating.

I changed the course, dictating a final, slow, sweep of the city.

Not everyone had made it. Stupid to think they might.

My dad’s house was gone, collapsed. Nobody inside.

Winslow High, gone.

The mall, the library, Fugly Bob’s, the boat graveyard, my old hideout, gone.

My old territory, unrecognizable. The Boardwalk was underwater now.

It didn’t even take him seconds to do.

Too many dead, not enough who were merely wounded and unable to walk. Humans were so fragile in the end. I stopped the Dragonfly and stepped out to seek out the first wounded. My bugs signaled rescue teams to get their attention.

The wounded here could have been my dad’s coworkers. People he went out to drinks with. They could have been Charlotte’s underlings.

So easy, in the midst of it all, to lose track of the fact that these were people. People with families, friends, with dreams, lives and goals.

Golem had said something like that, hadn’t he?

How many people had simply been erased in the wake of something this random, so instantaneous? So inexplicable? I still wasn’t sure what had happened. Tattletale was supposed to fill people in, but she hadn’t gotten in contact with me.

Or had she? I’d taken my earbud out. I looked to my phone, looked for transmissions.

A burst of messages, following just after takeoff. From the Chicago Protectorate, people who might have been my teammates if I’d ever been inaugurated. More messages, from Chevalier and the Brockton Bay teams.

I didn’t read them all. My eyes on the phone, I pointed the search and rescue to the next batch of wounded. I knew it was cold, but the corpses would have to wait. There were living people to find.

There were no shortage of corpses. The number of living people, by contrast, well… we’d see what happened in the next twenty-four hours.

The number of messages declined about thirty minutes after takeoff, then stopped altogether. Everyone who might have wanted to talk to me had found other things that needed doing. Other priorities, personal or professional.

Which was exactly why I was here. I’d just arrived at that conclusion earlier than they had. I put my phone away.

My mouth was pressed into a firm line as I helped the rescue workers.

We lifted a corner of a second floor’s floor, making room for someone get under and start retrieving a pair of women. Rachel whistled and pointed, and her German Shepherd seized the floor in its jaws.

The rescue workers seemed to hesitate with the dog’s presence, so I took the lead, crawling inside on my stomach. I used my hands with the arms on my flight pack to move enough debris that we could slide the second woman out.

There were more. Almost without thinking about it, I let myself slide back into the mindset I’d held for the past two years. Sublimating what I wanted to do in favor of doing what needed to be done.

Minutes ran into one another as we worked. I could see Rachel growing progressively more short-tempered, slower to give the orders, hanging back, rushing with the jobs.

That ended when we rescued a child that had a puppy wrapped in her arms. She clutched the limp animal like it was a security blanket, not crying, not speaking. She only stared at the ground, coughing hoarsely whenever she had to move. Her parents had been on either side of her, and neither had made it.

The paramedics fit her with an oxygen mask, but they failed to pry the animal from her arms.

I looked at Rachel, but she only shook her head.

Rachel’s power healed animals, but this one was gone.

From the moment we left that girl to be loaded onto a stretcher and carried off to firmer ground, Rachel moved a little more quickly, a little more decisively.

We finished with one site where the ground had collapsed and people had fallen into a depression, and then moved on to the next area. Some heroes were working alongside the authorities to try to rescue people from a building that had partially tipped over.

Clockblocker was there, along with Vista. I joined my powers to theirs in finding people and opening the way. Frozen time was used on panels, which were subsequently layered, so that one could offer support if another stopped working prematurely. Vista reinforced areas, then opened doorways, as I designated rooms where people were trapped within.

A golden light streaked across the sky in the wake of Scion’s flight, just along the horizon. A thinner beam being directed from Scion to the ground as he passed.

The aftershock of his passing took time to reach us. Steam started to billow, but the forcefield absorbed it.

The shuddering of the ground was more problematic. The entire city rumbled in response to the distant attack, a blow that was no doubt slicing deep into the earth’s crust, forcing everything to resettle.

The building we were working on was among those things that resettled. I watched as the building started to slide where it was resting against the building beside it, slowly descending, building speed.

My flight pack kicked in, and I flew through a window. I could feel the glass scrape against my scalp and the fabric of my costume.

I found one person, a twenty-something guy, took hold of their wrist, and pulled them behind me, running and using my flight pack at the same time.

Tearing him through the window meant slashing him against the shattered glass, and the weight wasn’t something I could manage with my flight pack. The building fell down around the people on the ground as I fell too far, too fast.

The wing on my flight pack was still broken. Couldn’t trust the propulsion.

I let him fall into a tree instead, from a solid two stories above, and then focused the rest of my energy into pulling out of the plunge.

The building was still crumbling as I landed a distance away. The rumble brought other, smaller structures down. I stood and watched as it continued its course.

There’d been seven more people to rescue inside. The other buildings in the area that had been caught up in the domino effect had contained three more. That was just in my range. How many more were dying as he continued towards the mainland, cutting deep into the plate of land that the landmass was perched on?

He hadn’t even been near us. Closer to New York or Philadelphia than anything. More lives taken, purely collateral.

When the dust settled, I moved in to help the people who had been on the ground. Vista and Clockblocker had protected most, between a dome and a shelf of land to provide shelter. Rachel, for her part, had helped others run in time, snatching them up with her dogs, but I counted three more dead, one dying.

Seeing them like that, bleeding, still warm, it caught me off guard. A kind of anxiety rose in the pit of my stomach, like an impulse to do something coupled with the frustration of knowing that everything I could manage to come up with was futile, hopeless. I either couldn’t do anything or I couldn’t think of what to do. It put me in mind of being back at high school, before I had my powers. Of being a child, powerless and unable to act.

I saw the image of Parian holding Foil in my mind’s eye, and it was joined by an almost sick feeling of mingled relief and fear. I knew exactly what I wanted and I was terrified to seek it out.

I could feel that same impatience Rachel had expressed earlier, but I couldn’t turn my back on this. I got the guy out of the tree and found him okay, but for a broken arm. He didn’t thank me, but I let myself chalk that up to him being in shock. I almost stumbled over to the latest injured and I attended to the wounded until the medics pulled themselves together, got organized and relieved me.

I didn’t really have a home anymore. Knowing my old house was leveled, that the cemetery where my mother had been laid to rest was gone, and that I’d never really come back here to hang out with the Undersiders… it hurt in a way that was very different from a knife wound, being shot or being burned. A crushing feeling, more like. But it was tough for reasons beyond the fact that I considered it home. I’d relinquished Brockton Bay, and my concern right now was more to do with the residents than the place itself.

I didn’t have a home in Chicago. Not in the jails, either.

But Rachel had forged a home for herself, and it had been in arm’s reach since we’d arrived.

Bastard and the dogs seemed to know I’d decided before I said or did anything. Rachel and I fell in step behind them.

Rachel mounted Bastard before we got to the portal. The efforts to erect a proper support beneath the portal had been set back by Scion’s strafing run, which left the portal hanging in the sky. Train tracks extended out from the portal in every direction, twisted and broken where collapsing ground had pulled other sections away.

There had been a tower erected around the portal, but it had collapsed into shambles as the ground dropped. Now they were using the pieces to form the general structure for a tower of ramps that would lead up to the portal.

Bastard picked up speed as he approached the tower, then set his claws on one of the ramps. The tower wavered perilously as Bastard leaped up to a higher point, coming to a rest on the very top of the dilapidated structure. It didn’t look like there were nearly enough reinforcements, and I could see everyone present tense as they saw the mutated wolf’s weight come to rest.

That tension redoubled as the wolf flexed its muscles, hunching down, and then leaped, more up than across, to get to the portal itself. A few planks of wood broke in that sudden, powerful movement, and one rail of the train track fell free as the wolf scrabbled for a grip on the ground beneath the portal.

When she was gone, the people beneath simply resumed work, heads down, dirty, defeated.

I took flight, entering the portal for the first time.

Earth Gimel.

The tower that contained the portal had a counterpart in Gimel, a matching tower, tall and riddled with train tracks, like a train station designed by Escher, tall rather than squat, with wide doorways for the trains to exit, and complicated reinforcements for the aboveground tracks, positioned so as not to interfere with the tracks below.

I flew out through one of those gates, catching up with Rachel.

Trains extended in every direction from the portal, on tracks that extended out into the middle of nowhere, into pristine forest and mountains. They were long, almost absurdly long.

Then again, the whole idea had been to have instant evacuation. Rather than have people make their way to trains, they’d had eight trains that simply spanned the length of Brockton Bay, so any given individual had to find the nearest train car and make their way down the aisle to an empty seat.

Around the tower, a small, odd settlement had sprung up. All of the sensibility of the city, but contained to a small area. Tall buildings, wide streets, and a look that matched up with a city proper rather than a smaller town. It was as though someone had cut and pasted the big city into the middle of this landscape.

On any other day, it would have been energizing, the fresh air, the sunny day, the green and the blue water of the bay, subtly different from the shape of the bay I knew. But today wasn’t that day.

People at benches were clipping the corners off of refugee’s drivers licenses and trading them for food rations and tents. Everything was prepped, set up in advance, and people were being orderly, even though the lines were so lengthy it looked like it might be hours before they got what they wanted.

Those that already had their kits were setting up or settling into spaces they’d designated for themselves. Some clustered close to the settlement, while others spaced out, where they’d have more elbow room. The tents were identical, dotting the area. The kits, apparently, included signs, and these same signs listed family names and details.

I scanned the signs, looking for names I might recognize. I headed in the direction Rachel had gone, but I moved carefully, making a mental note of everything I saw.

It was an extension of what I’d seen back in Los Angeles. People trying to cope against something where coping was a pipe dream. There were some breaking down in tears, people getting angry, those who had withdrawn into themselves.

In each expression, there was something that echoed my own feelings. A part of me wanted to hide from that, but another part of me knew I couldn’t.

It wouldn’t do any good, but I made a mental note of faces, of the pain, the loss. People who’d been removed from their homes and had all hopes for the future dashed. If I ever had the opportunity to get revenge, to get back at Scion for doing this, I wanted to remember these faces, find just a little more strength, make it hurt that much more.

But I wasn’t one for simply wanting to help, paying lip service and promising vengeance felt hollow. Instead, as a token gesture, something that might not even be noticed, I gathered up every mosquito in range and proceeded to murder them with other bugs. I kept the biting flies.

I wrapped the bugs around me. Fuck PR. The faint weight of the insects was reassuring, like a blanket. A barrier against the world, like Tecton’s armor or Rachel’s intimidating nature.

A sign caught my eye. I stopped, looking over the people in the small campsite.

Barnes.

No further details, no requests. I almost hadn’t recognized them.

Alan, Emma’s dad, had lost weight since I’d seen him last. He’d noticed me, and looked up, staring, his eyes red. His wife sat in a lawn chair beside him, while Emma’s older sister sat on a blanket at her mother’s feet, her mother resting one hand on her head.

Alan was staring at me now, and there was an inexplicable accusation in the look. His wife took his hand and held it, but he didn’t move his eyes a fraction.

When Anne, Emma’s sister, looked up at me, there was a glimmer of the same. A hint of blame.

Emma hadn’t made it. How? Why? Why could they all leave while Emma wouldn’t be able to? I might have thought Emma had been somewhere out of reach, but that didn’t fit. There would be no certainty she was dead. They’d be putting her name on a sign and hoping she turned up?

And why would they blame me? For failing to stop this from happening?

Fuck that.

I turned and walked away.

Once I was out of their immediate vicinity, I took a few running steps and let my flight pack lift me up. Better than zig-zagging between the campsites.

I floated over a sea of people with their heads down, their expressions alternately emotional and rigidly stoic in defeat. Hundreds or thousands of tents surrounded the area, and string fences no higher than one’s calf bounded off each of the sites.

Rachel had made her way outside the city limits, past even the tents that were set a five or six minute walk from any of the others. I followed her over the hill, to another small set of buildings. Cabins set on what had been Captain’s Hill in Earth Bet. I knew they were Rachel’s because of the dogs that were scattered around the premises, a small crowd milling around Bastard and the other mutant canines.

The largest cabin had three large bison skulls placed over the cabin door. Bastard and the other dogs had been tied up outside like horses, left to shrink, with a trough of water to drink from.

I landed, and I was struck by the realization that my flight pack might not be so easy to recharge, now. I still had the spare, fully charged, but Defiant might have his hands full, and the infrastructure or resources might not be available.

It was a minor thing. Inconsequential, in terms of everything that was going on. It wasn’t like the flight pack was going to matter a bit against Scion. But it was one more reminder of what was truly happening.

I stopped and turned to look over the landscape. I turned my head right until the small settlement and the sea of tents wasn’t quite visible, then turned it to the left to do the same. Focusing on the nature, the untouched wilderness.

Is this what Brockton Bay will look like, if we can’t win this fight? How many years does it take for the last building to collapse, for dirt and grass to drown away any and all signs we were ever there?

It was a daunting thought, a heavy thought that joined countless others.

The dogs barked as I approached on foot. I kept calm and waited.

I recognized the girl with the funny colored eyes and darker skin from Rachel’s hideout. I’d met her on my last week in Brockton Bay. With her presence alone, the animals collectively quieted. A single dog barked one last time, with two others reflexively following with barks of their own, but that ended it. The girl held the door open from me, and the dogs didn’t protest as I made my way inside.

Rachel was sitting on a couch with dogs arranged around her. Angelica was afforded a bit of favoritism, and received a touch of extra attention from her master. She, in turn, was extending a gentleness to Rachel that went beyond Angelica’s poor health and the glacial movements that accompanied chronic pain. Rachel looked defensive, her eyes cast down at the ground. Something more severe than the whole Scion business.

Charlotte, Forrest, and Sierra were present too, keeping their distance, keeping silent as we met again for the first time in over a year and a half, not moving from where they stood.

The kids gathered at the far end of the room, silently occupying themselves with a mass of puppies. I recognized Mason and Kathy, and didn’t recognize Ephraim at first glance. Jessie was conspicuously absent, but nobody seemed to be reacting to that gap. She’d left on her own, maybe. Found family.

Aidan sat off on his own, a pigeon sitting on his knee. He opened and closed his hands, and the bird hopped from the one knee to the other, then back again.Something had happened there, but it wasn’t a focus. Not right now.

Tattletale sat in her computer chair, but the computer screens were dark, the computers themselves unlit, quiet and still.

I didn’t like the emotion I saw on her face any more than I liked what I saw with the others.

Pity. Sympathy.

It wouldn’t be Grue. No. That didn’t fit. He’d been flying back, and he hadn’t been so far away that he’d be in the path of danger.

Not Imp either. Parian and Foil had been fine the last time I’d seen.

No.

Tattletale was best situated to focus on Brockton Bay. Who had made it. Who hadn’t. And there was only one Brockton Bay resident who truly mattered, that hadn’t been accounted for.

I felt a lump in my throat growing with every heartbeat, expanding every time I tried to swallow and failed.

Without waiting for a response, for any words of pity, or even verification, I turned and pushed my way out the door, taking flight.

I flew. Up over the bay, away from the city, away from this alien Earth. I blinded myself with my own swarm, drowned everything out with their drone, their buzz, their roar.

All of this time, the sacrifices, the loss of security.

The loss of me.

To do what? To stop this?

It had happened despite our attempts to the contrary.

To reconnect with my dad?

We had reconnected. I’d come clean about who and what I was. We’d built up a relationship that was new, accounting for the fact that we were changed people. Now, as I continued to fly, to put distance between myself and everything, I wasn’t sure it had been worth it.

The wind blew my hair, and I let my swarm move away, revealing the open ocean all around me. There was only the wind and the sound of the water to hear. The smell of salt water I’d come to miss.

My dad was gone, and I couldn’t bring myself to go back and get verification. I couldn’t handle it if there wasn’t verification.

I was cognizant of the fuel gauge, of the dwindling power of the flight pack. I knew I’d have to go back. I knew there was stuff to do.

But I’d spent the last age trying to build towards something, to prepare for the pivotal moment. I’d played my role, helped stop Hookwolf. I’d communicated with Foil to urge her to play possum, tracking where the enemy was and what they could see. It had led to us taking down Gray Boy and Siberian, trapping Jack.

And now the death toll was climbing. Scion continued his rampage, and I hadn’t even had the guts to own up to the failure.

I couldn’t bring myself to go back and do something minor. It was arrogant, proud, but I couldn’t bring myself to do search and rescue while the population was steadily scoured from the planet, the major cities wiped out like a human child might kick down anthills.

There was nothing in the worlds that I wanted more than a hug and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for one. My dad and Rachel were the only ones I could trust to offer one without further questions, without platitude or commentary, and I couldn’t get to Rachel without going through the others. My dad was even farther from my reach.

The mask I’d erected to see things through to this point was cracking and I couldn’t bear to show anyone my face.

The fuel gauge ticked down. I noted it reaching a critical point, where reaching land before I ran out might be difficult, if not impossible.

The sky was darkening. No clouds, no city lights. A cloud passed over sunset and the moon overhead, and it was startling just how dark things became.

A fluorescent glare cut through the darkness. My hair and my swarm stirred. I could feel the breeze from behind me.

I didn’t turn around.

“Your call,” Tattletale said, her voice quiet. “I’d like you to have my back, but I understand if-”

I shook my head, my hair flying out to either side. I turned around and floated over to the doorway that hung in the air.

I set foot on solid ground, and felt weirdly heavy when I did. It took me a moment to find my balance.

Tattletale caught me as the door closed beside us. Then she wrapped her arms around me in a hug. Odd, that she was shorter than me. When did that happen? I could remember her giving me a one-armed hug once, a long time ago. She’d been just a little taller than me then. Just the right height for a hug. Now we were like Foil and Parian. I was taller, receiving comfort from someone shorter than me.

I’d underestimated her. She didn’t ask any questions or offer any sympathy.

“They’re all here,” she said. “Ready?”

I hesitated, then spoke. My voice was rough. “Ready.”

We didn’t budge. She didn’t break the hug.

“Fuckit all,” I muttered. My voice was still weird with emotion. Maybe I’d keep my mouth shut at this meeting.

“Fuck it,” she agreed.

That said, we broke apart, took a second to breathe, and then made our way into the meeting room.

The entity swims through the void and it remembers. Everything is stored, dating back to the very beginning.

In the beginning, a species chokes their gray planet. Here and there, landmasses appear, created by inhabitants to trap or uncover the scarce food that exists, but the landscape is largely liquid, water thick with silt and other particles. The creatures worm in and around one another, and the planet has as much space taken up by the creatures as there is space left for other things.

Each has evolved the same capacity to shift between layers, to explore the alternate versions of this same world, and each of these other worlds are choked by more of the same creatures. Still, they continue to reproduce, and in their spread, they have eradicated virtually every source of food from every world they can access. The species is so numerous that it is nearly impossible to find space to surface at the uppermost areas of the water, where they might absorb starlight and radiation. What little energy they do manage to acquire in the process is lost in struggles to stay at the top and the continued efforts to avoid being pushed and pulled down by the coils of their neighbors.

Tangle.

The ancestor is aware of this, fully cognizant that the fight over resources will soon reach a climax, and there will be a war where every creature fights for itself. These wars are not graceful or sensible. The strongest can be torn apart as easily as the weakest. Once it starts, it will only end when a meager few remain.

Then, as they retreat to individual worlds to mend and restore themselves, the prey will multiply, and there will be a span of feasting for those lucky enough to survive.

With that, the process will begin anew. The same things will occur. This has happened no less than one hundred and seventy times, with little variation. Each time it occurs, realities are left dead, the grace period before resources run out once again is shorter. That the number of worlds exceed the number of particles that might exist in one world’s universe is inconsequential; the creatures multiply exponentially.

They are running out of time.

The ancestor knows this, and it isn’t satisfied. It knows its kin aren’t satisfied either. They are quiet, because there is nothing to say. They are trapped by their nature, by the need to subsist. They are rendered feral, made to be sly and petty and cruel by circumstance. They are made base, lowly.

With all of this in mind, the ancestor broadcasts a message. Each member of the species is made up of cells, of shards, and a typical broadcast is a simple concept, a single message nuanced by a million individual influences brought to bear by the shards that made up the speaker.

Proposal.

The message is voiced with violence, across innumerable wavelengths and means, through heat and motion and electromagnetics and light. Each shard cluster retains different abilities, minor tools for self-defense and offense, for finding prey and helping the ancestor make its way in the cold gray mud. In communicating, it turns the vast majority of these resources outward, to transmit the signal, and each form of communication has different ideas, different subtleties. In this, a greater, complex communication is achieved.

The act of speaking nearly kills it, it is so starved for energy.

It continues, and because this message is so different from the screams and cries over food and territory and everything else, the others listen. They expend their own energy to transmit it further. The idea spreads across every possible world like a ripple.

A species needs to continue evolving. It needs conflict and variation.

Failure to meet these objectives leads to self-destruction.

By the time the ancestor is finished communicating, it is depleted, unable to even move as it is shoved by the bodies of others that swim past.

Then, in bits and pieces, it is devoured.

Devoured not for energy, but for material.

The shards are absorbed, made a part of the eater, and the ones who eat swell in size. Unsustainable sizes, but they grow nevertheless.

All across the possible worlds, the creatures turn on one another. It is a war, but it takes a different shape, a different form. This time they are not eating for energy, but to stay afloat and stay large enough that they are not subsumed by a greater whole.

The gray planet makes several revolutions around its star before things reach a climax. Many of the creatures are so large they cannot subsist in one world alone. They weave into one world and worm out into another. Every flank is vulnerable to another of its kind lunging out into a world and attacking, consuming whole chunks at a time. Heat, cold, electricity and mental manipulations are leveraged in these struggles, slowing their targets down enough for them to wrap themselves around, shear off a section to take into themselves.

More revolutions, and only a handful remain. Energy is scarce, even with the individual bodies taking up whole oceans of the thin gray mud, absorbing all of the light and radiation they can. Countless worlds have grown dim, absorbed of all possible life and nutrients in the course of struggles and fighting.

The smallest ones recognize the fact that they don’t have energy, that it would cost them all too much if they continued fighting this uphill battle. They submit, and are consumed.

Two remain.

They spend time reorganizing themselves, shifting the sheer masses of shards they have acquired into forms useful for another task.

Once they are reformed, they leech all of the heat and energy from countless worlds and concentrate it in a single reality. The energy boils the oceans of silt-choked waters, disintegrates the landmasses.

Their bodies form into a large, complex shape, with only small fragments in this one world. The extensions of those same fragments extend into other realms, in concentrated, specific shapes, made for a purpose: to survive the next step.

The energy is released, and the planet shatters.

The shattering is so extreme that it extends into other worlds, through the same channels that the fragments used to extend into other realities. Every single one of the remaining habitable worlds is destroyed in the ensuing blast.

And the fragments radiate outwards, shedding and dropping their protective shells as they sail into the black, empty void.

Gestation.

Still flying through the void, the entity forms the word in the midst of its recollections.

They are children. Offspring. They travel the void, hoping to encounter another habitable world.

This is the beginning.

Countless perished, no doubt, in contact with lifeless moons, expending the last of their energy to search the possible iterations of that moon for life. More die within moments of the detonation, their outer casing too damaged, vital processes separated from one another

But others made contact with other worlds.

A world with life rooted in landmasses, weathering brutal storms of caustic acid. The one who arrives on that world struggles to find a means of survival.

It finds refuge in one of the dying plant structures, provides ambient heat to nourish it, so that the openings might close up and the shelter be made more secure.

The planet revolves around its star many times.

Many, many times.

The one that occupies the structure has bred, now, fragmented into clusters of shards that could occupy others.

Some shards have different focuses. This is the experiment, the test.

Of these plants, some thrive. Others die.

The creature tests different capacities, different clusters of shards. It watches, observes and records events into memory.

It borrows of the conflict and stress of this new, alien species. It borrows of the evolution, of the learning, of the crisis. In some ways, it is a symbiote. In others…

Parasite.

The fragments continue to divide, feasting on abundant resources, on light and radiation and the alien food sources it has started to learn how to consume. It spreads quickly now, across every possible variation of this world that sustains life.

It encounters another. A later arrival to the same planet, a member of its own species, another that is multiplying and consuming and growing. This new arrival chose a different means of survival, but it too chose a kind of parasitism.

They exchange shards where they meet. In these shards are codified memories, as well as the most effective techniques they have observed.

The planetoid is small, the range of options limited. A message is broadcast. Mutual agreement. They will move on.

Migration.

The process is similar. Drawing themselves together. There is cooperation, this time, as each shard returns to the source. The hosts die in droves, and are absorbed for energy.

They gather into the same vast forms that span multiple realities, and they leech energy from other worlds to fuel their exit from a single one. It takes time.

But something else occurs. A broadcast from the other, followed by an attack.

A carefully measured attack. The two creatures ruin one another with friction and pressure, burning hot, and shards are destroyed. Many are partially destroyed.

The other creature joins shards together into combinations, discards and destroys. Repeats the process.

New shards are created. Different functions. Forced mutation.

The end results parallel the studies the creatures have made of the plant life on this planet with its acid rain.

More blatant than intended in the beginning, but nothing lost. New strengths, regarding growth and durability.

They concentrate the energy as they form themselves into an encasement around the small planetoid.

Shell.

The detonation of the small planet scatters the individual clusters of shards, and this time, they are better inured to the harsher elements of space.

So the cycle continues.

The next world encountered has sentient life, civilization. A complicated, rich world.

It is a symbiosis, this time, more than parasitism. The two species learn from one another. The shards code the ‘technology’ of this new species into their memories. They learn of warping space and gravity.

Until the species turns against them. Those lucky enough to bind with the entity’s offspring war against those who do not. Some seek to rule.

Monarchs. The entity forms the thought, defining the memory.

The cycle is cut short by a forced exit, as the shards are rooted out and destroyed by the natives of this civilized world. They meet, they bind and again they share ideas. Richer perceptions, complex technologies and more are fashioned in the unity of three larger creatures. It is through differences in the greater entities that a richness is created, new derivations, new connections that none would be capable of on their own.

The planet is expended, the offspring are cast off in every direction once again.

This time, they are capable of moving, of controlling their course. Gravity, warping space.

The entity recalls all of this as it swims through the void and makes its way to the next target. It can reach back into the depths of its memory to recall all of what came before.

Each time the cycle started anew, lessons had been learned, methods refined. Each time, the spawn that are spewed out from the destroyed planet are more robust, larger, hosting innumerable memories. Where memories fall in parallel, they are shared out, offered to others.

After more than three thousand cycles, there are safeguards, there are protections. The arsenal of abilities, powers and protections the creature possesses have been built up. The entity remembers past failures and has adapted so they will not happen again.

The entities travel with partners now, moving in spirals while maintaining a measured distance from one another. Each is slightly different from the other, taking on a different role. Attacker and defender, warrior and thinker, builder and destroyer.

This divide is so they are able to take a different stance, shape their shards in subtle ways and clarify the results when their shards are compared and joined once again – some shall be kept, others discarded. Some will turn up interesting possibilities that can be explored when new shards are invented at the cycle’s end.

These individual focuses drive the pair, shape their tasks as they approach their destination.

The entity reaches out with clairvoyance, with precognition, and it views its destination. It communicates, covering vast expanses of space, transmitting signals across channels formed of the very foundation of this universe. These signals are broadcast only across specific realities, so that no aftereffects or lingering transmissions will contact a version of that world that hosts no life at all.

Destination.

Agreement.

Trajectory.

Agreement.

Each signal is nuanced, shaped with subtle details and clues by the trillions upon trillions upon trillions of individual shards that make up the entity. Through these nuances, it conveys more information than an entire planet of sentient beings might in a hundred revolutions.

They have settled on a target. Old lessons are remembered. It is a planet of sentient lifeforms, more primitive than some the entities have run into, more advanced than others. Social creatures, forming communities. These societies teeter on fine balances, but they persevere nonetheless. A world rife with conflicts, big and small.

Agitation.

The new hosts are to be bipeds, with a binary reproduction. Not uncommon, and rich with potential. Such a division and natural competition for reproduction fosters a natural evolution and development. The entities will focus on them over any of the sub-species.

These bipeds raise structures of hard earth or plant matter for shelter against the elements, draping themselves in softer materials for further protection. They shape the world around them, but are more immutable, unchanging in form. Different from the entity, in many ways.

This was the stage in the cycle when the entity is most aware, most focused. It observes the possible worlds and judges which would be best.

Colony, the entity voices the idea.

With that same signal, the various nuances suggest countless worlds that are to be removed from consideration. Worlds without enough population.

Agreement, the response comes.

The entity’s counterpart is taking a passive role, investigating only to confirm, to validate. This is concerning. Where is the counterpart’s focus, if not on this vital decision?

It investigates, and in the doing, it prepares some shards for analysis and understanding of this particular society and culture. Language, culture, patterns of behavior, patterns of society. This is something the counterpart should be emphasizing.

The process is interrupted by an arrival.

A member of their own species, approaching. It was smaller, took a different form. It used different means to travel.

This was what had distracted the counterpart.

Its ancestors had traveled a different path, easily hundreds of cycles ago, before the entities had begun traveling in pairs. This new arrival had encountered different worlds, less worlds, and it had developed differently.

The lesser one crossed paths with the entity’s counterpart. For a duration, they intertwined, meeting through multiple realities, their bodies rubbing and crushing against one another.

A sharing of details, a wealth of knowledge, from hundreds of cycles. A sacrifice of the same.

The lesser one moves on, bloated with new shards and knowledge, but the counterpart flounders.

It sacrificed too much.

Concern.

Confident.

The counterpart is not worried. The signal carries notes of hope for the future. The counterpart will replenish its shards, its stores of knowledge, memories and abilities at the conclusion of this cycle, reuniting with the entity.

The counterpart is supposed to be the passive figure, the thinker, the planner, while this entity is the warrior, the protector. The entity is forced to make up for the counterpart’s disability, to slow its advance through the void as they approach their destination and devote resources to analyzing, something the other should be doing instead.

The focus is on one reality. They will subsume it first, then expand to others. The most efficient route, achieving maximum amounts of conflict. By testing their own shards against one another, they gather information. The entity’s shards will fight among each other, and they will fight the counterpart’s, and they will steadily learn.

With a species such as these social bipeds, the entities can draw new conclusions, come up with new uses for shards. It tracks and records details that allow it to shape new shards at the cycle’s conclusion.

But their new hosts are a weak species, fragile. The abilities must be limited in scope. Worlds that are too advanced would be too fragile, as advanced weapons eliminate too many, cut the process short.

Destination.

Agreement, the response is not so complex, is expressed in a softer, quieter manner.

Still, the pair have settled on a set of realities.

The entity focuses on one. Enough individuals, natural conflict and confrontation. A balance of physical and emotional stressors. The environment is damaged, but not so much it would inhibit growth.

Hive. The entity communicates the decision.

Agreement. The counterpart grasps it immediately, knows which reality he means.

The focus changes. An interplay of communications, one bouncing off the other, as they designate realities. Each shard needs one, some shards need to cluster and reside across multiple realities. They draw on these worlds for power, for energy, and thus fuel the techniques they have been coded with.

Each shard, in turn, needs a target. The entity’s focus expands, designating likely partners. Past mistakes have been accounted for, and the shards will connect in a covert manner. They will reside in other worlds, uninhabited worlds, and they will remain cloaked and concealed in areas this new host species is unlikely to explore.

It is a negotiation.

Ownership here.

Claim there.

Territory here.

With each statement, they each catalogue the realities. Similar realities are included together, for both the entities and the shards. Too many complications and confusions arise when interacting with worlds that are exceedingly similar. Not an effective form of conflict, when it is the same lessons learned over and over again. It is better to connect them into groupings, limit exposure to each set of worlds. One shard is capable of settling in a grouping of near-identical worlds, drawing energy from all of those worlds at once.

The entity looks to the future to check for danger.

Plague.

All signs point to the shards murdering their hosts.

The hosts must be protected, or this will be disastrous, counter-intuitive. The entity adjusts the innate safeguards, protections to reflect the host species and their tolerances. The bonding process will protect the host, where the host needs protection. Shards that are capable of providing flame at will cannot burn the hosts, now. Shards are reorganized, combined and clustered where necessary, to grant sufficient protection.

Infestation.

Better, but not perfect. The entity refines the process, limits certain abilities, so they will not eradicate too many at a time.

Soft. The broadcast is sent out to the counterpart, along with suggestions and tips on how to refine the shards.

Agreement, the counterpart accepts.

But the entity can still see fallout effects. There are parallels in memory storage. Not many, but there may be glimmers where the subject is capable of perceiving the information stored in the shard as the connections are formed.

For good measure, the entity breaks up one shard cluster, tunes it, then codes the effect into each and every shard. It studies the host species further, refines, attunes.

It takes time, but the entity forms a sufficient safeguard. The host species will forget any significant details.

The broken shard is cast off, joining countless others. It will bond to a host. The entity looks forward, checking.

After the target planet has revolved thirty-three times around its star, this shard will connect to a host.

A male guards his offspring, a female, with his size and bulk. A group of hostile bipeds cluster around them. They call out, making unusual loud sounds, suggesting intoxication. One of the hostile ones gestures, gripping its male parts, pulling them free of their coverings. A sexual gesture follows, waving the organ left and right, thrusting it into the empty air.

Sounds of amusement, laced with hostility.

The male and his offspring retreat as far against the nearest construction as they are able.

The shard connects, attaching to the male.

No. It is ineffective. The female is clearly more distressed.

Prey.

There is a way to maximize exposure to conflict.

The entity taps into its understanding of the bipeds and how they operate, recognizes the signs of distress, the nuances such things can have.

It views the future again, with changes made in the code.

This time, the shard settles in the male, then immediately shifts to the more distressed female.

Insinuation. The shard connects to the host’s neural network.

The bond is created.

The shard opens the connection as the stress peaks, and the host doubles over in pain, bewildered, stunned. The shard then forms tendrils that contact each individual in the area. It retains traces of the entity’s tampering, of the studies in psychology, awareness and memory, and is quick to adapt. It finds a manner in which it can operate, then alters itself, solidifying into a particular state. The remainder of the functions are discarded, the ones in the shard itself are rendered inert to conserve power, while the ones in the host fall away, are consumed by the shard. The host’s neural network changes once more.

The female disappears from the awareness of the hostile ones that surround it.

The entity looks to the future, to see if this is sustainable, efficient.

All seems well.

A view of other bondings suggests this emphasizes younger targets, particularly those in a middle stage of development, between a lesser phase and an adult phase. Emotions are higher at that juncture, and the possibility of conflict increases further.

The entity allows for deeper connections to foster more conflict. The underlying instructions are already present from previous cycles, and can be left largely alone. These bipeds war with each other enough. It will only serve to assist the most extreme cases.

Forget. The entity informs its counterpart of the changes it made.

Agreement. The counterpart acknowledges.

Emotion. More changes.

Agreement.

Before the last response is received, the entity has already begun shedding shards that won’t prove useful or particularly problematic. Shards for attack and defense, distributed over an even geography, an even timeline.

More complicated shards require more focus. Ones that harbor stored memory of technology and development in past cycles are prepared so they might bond with a host and transmit that knowledge.

For others, there is no easy way to apply the contained knowledge, so they are coded to draw from the host’s recollection and awareness, or to search the entire planet for details and information on what it might be able to do.

Ones that alter the nature of the host in fundamental ways are planted throughout, so as to add more variables in how the others must adapt to them. A host that chooses how gravity applies to it. A host that can become a storm of friction, intensifying all friction in an area around it. One that becomes immaterial. Another that can make paths between realities, with safeguards to keep it away from ones the shards are rooted within.

The entity is approaching the galaxy cluster in question now, and it sees its counterpart doing the same, if at a slightly slower pace. Both are trailed by a cloud of shards now, each cast off in such a way that it won’t reach its target location until a set time and date.

The entities begin to close their spiral dance, drawing together as much as they can with the counterpart struggling.

They approach their destination, and begin to disintegrate in great quantities, until thirty percent remains, twenty, ten, two…

It will take one hundred and sixty revolutions before their destination reality hits critical mass.

Three hundred and thirty-one revolutions before the shards reach a critical mass and enough information is gathered. To look to the future and seek that information in advance would take too much energy. To do this and fail would be a catastrophic setback in the cycles.

This suffices. It spends the least energy for the maximum result.

The counterpart is descending, having selected a destination world. It is hemorrhaging shards in clusters, due to the excessive exchange of shards with the lesser one, too soon before their arrival at their destination. These shards are breaking off in huge volumes.

A check confirms these shards are coded, that everything is technically well.

Danger, the entity broadcasts.

Confident, the counterpart replies.

The counterpart remains secure. Nothing to be done.

There is no more time to devote to the crisis. The entity focuses on its destination, on the next part of the cycle.

The shards have largely been assigned to hosts. They will remain latent, they will wait for the first crucial moment of crisis and use that to shape their function, to better assist their host.

It is impossible to check the exact circumstances for each event. Some shards harbor particular concepts, and will shape their application to the host’s needs. Others are coded with particular applications, and will either scan viable realities or the host’s frame of reference for how that application will come to pass.

Physical harm will grant physical assets, be it direct or abstract. Immediate danger will nudge the shard towards defensive abilities. Ranged attacks against living threats, an ability to shape or affect the environment against environmental dangers.

Successes will help refine the abilities, provide inspiration for the development of new shards. Failures will help all the same.

In hosts, too, there will be variations. The shards might seek out different hosts, if others are in range, as the perception-altering one did. They will fragment and transmit to other hosts, as they grow and develop.

The entity is satisfied. In terms of raw size, it is but a small fragment of what it once was, barely a cluster of shards now. Its part in this phase of things is nearly done.

The next part of the cycle begins.

It chooses an unoccupied reality. A barren planet. Its perceptions focus on the landmasses in idle curiosity. Different from the focus reality, but similar.

They have reached the solar system in question now. They brush up against one another, and the entity shores up its counterpart where it can, sacrificing its own shards in the process.

Acceptance. Gratitude.

The counterpart’s message is thin, but the entities are but a ten-thousandth of a percent of their original size.

It turns its attention to adapting.

In the course of thousands of cycles, the entities have refined their methodology. There are no true points where they are vulnerable.

As the whole, as the entity, it is safeguarded by countless abilities, defenses, perceptions and options. It is fat with the knowledge of every generation that came before, the mistakes, the problems, and the solutions. While it travels the void, it is virtually untouchable.

But there have been times where the shards were vulnerable, after bonding with hosts. Even now, there are dim possibilities that they might be rooted out. There are issues where shards that have been coded to generate conflict could do too much damage, disrupting the cycle.

This is something that must be tended to.

The entity turns its attention briefly to their target reality, observes the various life forms.

Always, in the course of its examination of the possible futures, it was evaluating, checking to see what was necessary.

A quick glance into the future, not so deep a look as to expend too much of its remaining energy. Conservation is key at this juncture, and from here on out.

The entity’s present configuration is satisfactory. The chance the cycle can be interfered with has become infinitesimally small.

The shard that allows the entity to see the future is broken up, then recoded with strict limitations. It wouldn’t do to have the capabilities turned against the entity or the shards.

The fragment it just used is sent off, directed to a small female.

The other fragments in that same cluster are retained. To see the future is resource intensive, but the entity will harbor it as a safeguard.

More abilities are used to check, investigate, and then cast off. The ability to communicate and receive signals is unnecessary now. To transmit signals across wavelengths. It, too, is intentionally crippled as an ability. It would not do to have that one being used with regularity. Such would be distracting for the entity and its counterpart.

When it knows the configuration is absolutely decided, it reaches for the last fragment it will cast off. This one, too, it cripples, even largely destroys, so as to limit the host from using it in the same fashion.

In a haste to decide matters before it enters the stratosphere of that barren planet, the entity casts it off to a similar location as the future-sight ability. A similar time, thirty-one revolutions from now. The destination is a male, thin, in the company of strong males and females, drinking.

And with that, the entity lands on the barren planet.

The planet revolves around its star once before the entity even moves.

The entity rises and extends its perceptions across multiple realities.

It’s time.

Chrysalis.

The entity changes.

A star that burns twice as hot burns for half as long.

Not truly, but the entity is aware of the idioms and patterns of this world, is already thinking periodically in terms of the words and ideas of their languages, to frame thoughts for itself in this pivotal moment. It serves to help codify the messages and intent.

The entities burn as hot as any star, with their sheer mass, their scale, the power they wield. This is acceptable while traveling the void, when much of the body remains in a hibernation state. Stored energy is expended as a resource, to view the future, to perceive and communicate.

But this is not sustainable here, in this phase of the cycle, when the entity is so much smaller.

The entity has cast off all but the most essential parts of itself, distributing the shards throughout this reality. More shards will shower on other realities in time, likely around the point the first have started fragmenting in greater numbers

Cycle to cycle, the role changes. Direct involvement, watching from afar, being visible or staying out of sight. Different roles to shepherd the shards through different worlds.

The entity takes shape. It retains the capabilities it had when it first arrived.

Imago. Adult state.

Much of it is still too large for the target reality. It leaves that portion of itself behind, maintains a connection. A safeguard. The body it uses is but an extension, a tendril.

It codifies the thoughts and memories of the society it investigated into a usable fashion.

Then it waits.

Sentinel.

Time passes. A revolution of the planet around its star.

Something has gone wrong. It is time, but it has not received a broadcast from the counterpart.

The entity emerges, stepping into the target reality.

It can see its shards showering down from above like meteors traveling the void. The first to arrive.

It can see the shards of the counterpart.

Not all are intact.

Dead shards. Damaged ones. Vital shards, even, going to hosts.

The entity destroys these on sight. They are corrupt, ruined. They will fail to provide usable results.

Extending its perception over the world and other realities, the entity can sense everything at once. It can sense conflict. Wars.

It remains aware of its limited lifespan. Three thousand and six hundred revolutions. To search like this costs a tenth of one revolution’s time. There is more than enough remaining before the cycle concludes.

Or there should be.

The entity abandons the search. Enough information has been obtained for it to know.

The counterpart is dead.

For a very long time, the entity is still. It does not move, and instinctively holds back every ability, as if conserving energy in the face of a vast threat.

But this is not a threat that it can weather, like a storm of acid rain: The cycle has been disrupted.

Worse, it is terminated. The entities have altered themselves so that each half of a pairing serves part of a role. It is only with the counterpart that it can gestate, that it can modify the individual shards, cast the next generation out and start the cycle anew.

In seeking to understand the host creatures, the entity had coded shards to emulate them. It is those same shards that experience the entity’s first ever emotion.

Crushed.

The entity comes to experience a deep, profound sadness, for the very first time.

Time passes, as the entity considers the ramifications. The sky grows dark, then light again. Dark, then light.

A structure, a vehicle approaches. A hull pierces the water as it draws nearer. A crowd stands on the uppermost surface, gathering. They stare, even babble among themselves, their voices jumbling together, a hum, a blur. He can see into the other realities that lie adjacent to this one, similar people, similar crowds.

Drone.

Buzz.

They are communicating, and the entity is unconcerned. It watches as they draw close to the edge of the vehicle, pressing themselves against the barrier that was erected at the edge. They reach out.

They worship him. Of course they do. His form was crafted to fit the values of this reality. They hold faith, and the entity chose a shape that fit the most celebrated figures of the most popular faiths. Race divides this species, so the entity deliberately chose a form that didn’t fit any one race, with skin and hair given the color and texture of another thing they celebrated and worshipped – a mineral.

This is intentional.

The entity sees a shard already taking root in one of the vehicle’s passengers. One of the dead shards, damaged. The entity’s vision allows it to see the man’s inside, the damage. He is dying of a systemic issue in his body, producing the wrong type of cells in the wrong places.

The Entity slowed as a figure barred its path. A female, with her arms outstretched. Smaller life forms were arranged around and behind it.

Vaguely familiar.

“Stop, Scion,” the female said.

The entity came to a complete stop. It could see the connection to the female’s shard, the activity as it broadcast signals, reaching out to contact lifeforms throughout the area, coordinating them.

All around the entity, there were shards in varying states of maturation. The female’s was among the most mature. Seasoned by conflict, heavy with information, lessons learned, tactics, applications, organization. It had already fragmented once, heavy enough with information that it could afford to handle other roles. The fragment would have a derivative ability, and given proximity, it would hopefully remain close enough to exchange information with the shard that it had split off from. There were no signs of that exchange. The female had separated ways from the fragment.

The entity recognized her shard. The last one that had split off before the entity took on this form.

Queen.

The entity’s despair deepened for a moment. It was a good thing that the shards were harvesting such good information, but nothing would come of it. The cycle had been disrupted.

“I know you want to help, but it’s too dangerous. You’re too strong, and this situation is fragile. It’ll do more harm than good.”

More harm than good. Scion accepted that as a given and decided to stay where he was.

The female kept on talking as memories stirred.

■

A male approached. No shard, no powers. The area was dark, the planet turned away from its star. The entity was hovering over the highest point of a short bridge that spanned a river.

Lost. It had created itself for a purpose it could no longer fulfill.

The male pulled off one foot-covering, hefted it, then threw it. It bounced off the entity’s face, not even eliciting a blink.

The male hauled on the other foot-covering, but it was too tightly bound.

He gave up, half-hopping, half running up the length of the bridge, pounded his fists on the entity’s chest, scratched, clawed. Aggressive actions, but it didn’t matter. The entity was invulnerable. It could glance into the immediate future and know there was no potential reality where this male would be able to harm it.

A strike to the entity’s face. The male nearly fell from the bridge. The entity would have let him.

“You don’t- you don’t deserve this! This power!” The male sniveled, mucus running from his nose. Flecks of spit dotted his lips from the sheer force of his words.

“They keep saying you’re fucking sad!? What do you have to be sad about? You weren’t beaten black and blue by a fucking girl you were too chickenshit to hit back! You haven’t been kicked around by motherfucking teenagers who thought it’d be good for a lark! Buggered against your will… no! You get to be untouchable!”

The male clawed and scratched, long dirty fingernails scraping at the entity’s body, clawing at a nipple, at the part the entity had crafted to look like genitalia. Nothing did any harm. Even the dirt skidded off, failing to find any traction in the entity’s skin.

The male collapsed, his face pressed up against the entity’s chest. His mucus and saliva slid off with the same ease the dirt had.

“Fuck you. Fuck you, golden man. You don’t… you don’t deserve to be miserable. Or you don’t deserve to be miserable and useless. Fucking burden on society, distracting people from shit that needs doing. Fuck you, you ponce. You… Fuck you! Go do something. Never got that. All these sad fucks that kill themselves or hide away… if you’re going to be miserable without a damn excuse, go to Africa and help those damn kids who were orphaned in wars. Go… save people from burning buildings. Help clean up after disasters. Work in a fucking soup kitchen or something. I don’t care.”

The man’s voice had gone quiet, barely more than a whisper.

Another pound of fist against the entity’s flesh.

“I don’t care if it’s penance or if it’s a fucking way to kill time. Do some goddamn good, and maybe you’ll feel like you’re worth a damn. Maybe you’ll stop being so fucking miserable.”

The entity continued to stare out over the city. It absorbed the words, considered them.

It was a task. A role it could play.

It was something. What had this male said? Which were ones the entity could achieve?

Save orphans in wars. Rescue people from burning buildings. Clean up after disasters.

The entity took flight once more.

■

The entity remained patient. Patient then, patient now.

“…You could go to Houston or New York, even. That’s far enough away from Jack,” the young female with the administration shard was still speaking, quiet, intense, urging without prodding.

The entity and the young female were still hovering over what was becoming a major site of conflict. The entity extended its senses over the area.

At the center of it all was a man. Not at the center, but everything tied to him. Everything moved in relation to him, and he moved in relation to others.

The entity turned its attention to the young female. Its hands found the entity’s, pulled.

There was a meaning behind the gesture, but the entity was too lost in observing what was going on below to care.

A confrontation had started between a young male and an older one. A fragment of a shard against a very mature shard. The most mature shard in this area, at a glance.

The more mature power was unleashed. A wavelength power, a kinetic transmission.

The entity watched, and it recognized the shard at work.

The broadcast shard. One that had been crippled, just like the shard of the female that floated before the entity now. The same shard that had managed communication between the entity and its counterpart.

The entity turned to observe another conflict. One shard was connected to eight individuals. A lesser shard, connected to eight unusual hosts.

The eight advanced in clusters, moving towards the various individuals that seemed to be hostile to them. The shards connected to each individual provided more detail than anything else.

“You big golden idiot! Come on.”

Her subjects formed a thick cloud, blocking the entity’s vision. No matter. It could still perceive the world.

“Come on!”

She pulled harder.

The entity turned to follow the confrontations.

The male with the broadcasting power was swinging his sword. The younger one was erecting defenses, lashing out.

Their shards were reacting. The entity could see how every aggressive shift in the younger one was met by an instinctual retreat in the older. Cause and effect, invisible but there. The nature of the shifts changed as they started speaking.

To strike the one with the mature passenger was akin to trying to catch a leaf in the wind. The hand moved the air which moved the leaf, and it slid just out of reach, just beyond the hand’s grasp.

Ah. There. A narrow miss. The male slid out of reach, and he prepared to go on the offensive. His shard shifted, just as ready and able to capitalize on the weakness in offense as he was able to evade trouble in defense.

A shard flared to life, and the entity saw an effect take hold around it. It reached out and found a barrier it could not penetrate.

Cell.

Its hand was moved back to the previous position. It was caught in a sinkhole of distorted time. Over and over again, it moved in a steady loop.

Snare.

A trap.

■

The city burned, and the entity wielded its power. Controlled wavelengths disrupted the molecules, extinguished each source of heat, inside and out, rendering it a little cooler than the ambient temperature.

Countless individuals fled for safety, running in droves. The entity watched, but it did not rest.

It hadn’t rested in years. The longest it had stood still was in the company of Kevin Norton, where the man gave it a white covering that clung to its body. As instructed, the entity kept the cloth clean, pushing out energy in patterns and yields that would drive out the soil and smoke while leaving the cloth intact.

It lowered itself to get a better angle on one blaze in the basement area of a library. In the doing, purely by accident, it lowered itself to eye level with a female on a balcony.

The female was startled, afraid, unable to even breathe. It could look inside the female and see the emotions as an increased heart rate, hormones and adrenaline churning through her system.

It almost blurted out the words. “Kto vy?“

The entity understood the Russian words as it understood all languages, through the knowledge it had scanned for and codified, prior to arriving.

It remembered the instructions Kevin Norton had provided. To be polite, to be considerate.

Speaking, nonetheless, was an unfamiliar concept.

How to answer? The entity did not know what it was. It had no role but the one ascribed to it by Kevin Norton.

In thinking of the man, the entity thought of a thing the man had said. A word in the midst of a story about ill-behaved spawn.

As it did most words, the entity had searched its memory for details on the concept.

Zion.

A promised land.

A utopia. A harmonious kingdom.

The promised land could be this world at its climax, the shards at critical mass, the entity and its counterpart bringing about the end of the cycle. It could be utopia, as the entity understood the term.

It could be the world at peace, people saved from hardship, as Kevin Norton had described it.

Whether the entity was somehow able to return to its original task or whether it continued carrying out Kevin Norton’s answers in an attempt to find itself, the term fit.

“Zion,” it spoke.

■

Memories. A refuge, a reminder of how things should be, if the cycle were intact. There would be more shards, more conflict, but it would be more controlled. The dead shards polluted the setting, almost too numerous.

The female with the administrator shard had long since fled, covering the retreat with her small army of lesser lifeforms, more traps snapping into place in her wake.

It thinks of Zion, and it thinks of other metaphors and ideas. In the thirty-three revolutions since arriving on this planet, the entity has had time to think. It has saved a lot of individuals from harm, heard many prayers.

It was aware of everything that occurred around it. The planet’s star moved across the sky, above the dark, heavy clouds of moisture. Small movements, but movements nonetheless.

It thought of the beetle in one mythology, rolling the orb across the sky.

It was an idea that persisted across mythologies. Scarab. Chariot. The Brother. The Sky Barge.

Abstract thought. Was that the sort of pattern that led to a connection, an inspired idea in the development of new shards? The entity wasn’t sure. Its counterpart was supposed to handle such matters, retain that capacity for thought and analysis.

Its physical body continued to loop in time. It didn’t matter.

The conflict continued. The broadcaster was moving in and out of trouble, relying on a pronounced projection that was being emitted by a dead shard to provide further protection. There was another entity nearby. A boy with another dead shard. Odd, that they had gravitated towards the broadcaster.

Mature shards, a situation ripe with conflict, so much to be gained, and nothing could be done with that. The entity felt a hint of another emotion, dismissed it. The simulation of the host-creature’s psychology was only that. A simulation.

It would spend some time here. Nothing would change in any event. Kevin Norton had passed.

The entity observed the ongoing conflict. No less than five seconds after it had been trapped, two figures had emerged from a doorway between worlds. The entity could see the paths forming, trace them back to the source. Another world, a living world without a shard occupying it.

They engaged the eight with their own perception abilities, intervening to assist a group of others. As a pair, they opened fire with guns, then waded into hand to hand combat.

The entity looked at the male, and it saw the connection to the same shard as the eight. His connection was stronger, more mature.

It looked at the female, and it saw a shard that wasn’t its own, but wasn’t dead.

Puzzling.

The fight progressed. Strikes with weapons and with the creature’s limbs were evaded, a careful dance of attacks where each edge and bludgeon touched skin, many even shaving off the finer hairs from cheeks, noses and chins.

The male fought the eight in such a way that they couldn’t move without exposing themselves to attacks from the female. Each movement placed the male in a path for obvious harm, a fatal blow, but the eight could not capitalize on that. At the same time, he positioned himself in such a way that four or five at a time were unable to retreat. Not just in reach of weapons, but in reach of arms, elbows, for being taken hostage.

The female felled three of the eight, and the situation was decided. The remaining five dropped to a position where they sat on their knees. She spoke, and an interdimensional portal appeared behind them.

They crawled through, heads down, and the portal closed.

The pair glanced up at the entity as another wormhole opened. They stared.

The entity, in turn, faced a different direction, but it could perceive them nonetheless.

They disappeared back into the portal.

Puzzling.

The entity observed as the fight concluded elsewhere.

The broadcaster remained unaware as an individual without any attachment to shards at all entered the confined space, unloading a vaguely familiar substance over the group. Something the entity might recollect if it had access to all of its memories. A technology.

It didn’t matter.

The entity watched as the broadcaster was sealed in a time distortion.

A female, standing just outside another time distortion, walked around the effect, charging objects with energy. The entity could see as the small pieces of alloyed metal unfolded, taking shape in not just this world, but all realities, at the same space and time, bristling with an effect that would sever their attachment to most physical laws.

They were thrown, and they disrupted connections to two shards at once. The projection disappeared, only to reappear a distance away. The boy who had created the time distortions fell as well.

Sting, the entity thought. Once it had been a weapon for his kind, against his kind, back in the beginning, when they had dwelt in oceans of gray sludge.

The others hurried to confine the broadcaster. They were apparently aware of what he could do.

Interesting.

■

“Just you and me,” Tecton said. “That’s what he said. Between gasps of pain, anyways. ‘I wish I had better company, but I’ll take what I can get. Ironic, that you’re so boring.”

“And that’s it. The D.T. guy foamed up the gap, I raised the shelf, you closed the hand, and he was completely sealed in.”

“You’re right. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“He hasn’t ever met me.”

Golem shook his head. “Doesn’t seem world ending.”

■

“…I always hated the blank… slates,” Jack groaned the last word. His utterances were finding an odd cadence or rhythm between the gasps of pain, the fresh wounds that were actively criss-crossing his body, opening his stomach, his intestine being gripped and pulled through the wound as if by an invisible force.

The foam weighed him down, and in the midst of the complete and total darkness, he stared skyward.

She raised her eyes from the computer. Her underlings were arranged around the room, along with others. Her soldiers were at the ready, alongside Imp’s Heartbroken, the first and second in command of the Red Hands, Charlotte, Forrest and Sierra.

Sierra was bouncing her leg nervously. She’d cut off her dreads, and her hair was short to the point of being in a buzz cut, with a fringe flopping over one side of her forehead. But for the hair and two small hoop earrings in one ear, she was a businesswoman. Had to be, when she was the ostensible owner of all of Brockton Bay’s prime real estate.

Charlotte was in the company of one of the children, holding him close. Her fingers toyed with a paper origami cube, and she was doing her best not to look like she was poised on the edge of her seat for any news at all.

The second she gave the word, they’d be ready to evacuate the city, to get people onto the trains and moved through the portal.

But…

“Things have settled,” she said. “Jack is contained.”

She could see them all relax as if strings that had held them rigid had just been cut.

“That’s it?”

“I don’t know,” Tattletale said. She grinned wide. “But if the world is ending, then it’s an awfully quiet end.”

There were chuckles here and there, nervous relief.

“Go home, or go do whatever,” she said. “I’ll be in touch with more news, let you know how your territory leaders, past or present, are coping.”

As a crowd, the others began filtering out. Sierra stayed where she was, pensive, but the nervous bouncing of her leg had stopped.

“That’s excellent,” Tattletale said. She looked at the seven year old. “How are you?”

“Okay. Had a nightmare for the first time in a long, long time. I woke up and I was sleepwalking, and I didn’t know where I was… I got scared, and then it happened.”

“What happened afterwards?” Tattletale asked.

“Birds.”

“Birds. I see. Interesting,” she said. Her eye moved over to the boards that marked the perimeters of the room. Each was packed with information in her small, tight, flowing handwriting. Messy, but she’d gotten good at putting pen to paper these past few years

“I push and the birds go where I pushed. Or I pull and they fly away from that spot. It’s hard to do. I can see what they see, but not while I’m controlling them.”

“Like Taylor, but birds, and not that flexible. I see.”

“We suspected he would trigger,” Charlotte said.

Tattletale looked up, surprised.

“Aidan had a dream one night, back when the nightmares stopped. He drew that picture.”

“Picture?”

“I gave it to you. I kind of emphasized it might be important.”

“Pretty sure that didn’t happen,” Tattletale said. She stood from her desk. “Sorry, Aidan, to squabble in front of you, but Charlotte needs to remember I don’t tend to miss stuff like that.”

“All that money you’ve given me for helping to look after the territory? The money for the kids? I’d stake it all on what I’m saying now. I promise, I swear I handed you that picture.”

Tattletale frowned.

“I swear,” Charlotte said, for emphasis.

“Then there’s a fucked up stranger power at work. Don’t like that idea. Let’s see. Um. I store everything in a rightful place. If you handed me a picture… was it here?”

“Here.”

Tattletale crossed the room. She pulled a bin off a shelf, then sorted through file folders.

Charlotte said, “There.”

Tattletale stopped, then went back a page.

“Huh. I stand corrected.”

There was a beep on the computer. Tattletale went back to the computer to investigate, shrugged, then sat down.

“Well?” Charlotte asked.

“Well what?”

“The picture.”

Tattletale frowned. “What picture?”

“What’s going on?” Aidan asked.

Charlotte stalked over to the bin that was still out, grabbed the paper, then slammed it down on the desk. “I don’t think a piece of paper can have superpowers. Pay attention. Focus Memorize.”

Tattletale frowned. She turned her attention to the paper.

There was a block there. She felt it slide out of her mind’s eye, caught herself.

She turned her attention to the surroundings, the underlying ideas.

“Aidan? Describe it to me. I don’t know what you drew.”

“Those are kind of like fish, or worms, or whales, but they fold and unfold in ways that are hard to understand, and there’s stuff falling off them. Those are stars, and-“

Tattletale felt something fall into place.

As though a floodgate had opened, the pieces started coming together. She stood from the desk, striding across the room.

There were still gaps in her work on the boards, where she was outlining everything, trying to decipher the underlying questions. Now, she began unpinning things from the board.

She was remembering, and she was putting it together, now. There was a block, but she’d formed enough connections now that things were going around the block.

The whole. The idea had stuck with her.

All powers fed back into a greater whole, each was a piece of a greater construct.

Of Aidan’s fish-whale-worm things.

But that wasn’t it.

No. It didn’t fit in terms of timeline.

There was more.

“Like gods,” she said, recalling.

“Like viruses, like gods, like children,” Charlotte said. “Back on the day I first met you, you said that.”

Like viruses, infecting a cell, converting it into more viruses, bursting forth to infect again.

Like gods. So much power, all gathered together. All powers stemmed from them.

He continued grunting. His switch to turn off the pain took a second to activate, took deliberate action, but getting in the rhythm meant he could buy himself one or two seconds of relief with each loop. It was a question of concentration, and his concentration slipped.

“It’s simpler. Us monsters and… psychopaths, we gravitate towards… predation, because we were originally… predators. Originally had to hunt… Had to be brutal, cruel…”

He paused, spending a few moments grunting in pain, letting the loops continue.

“Order to survive. Violence was what made us… or broke us back… in the beginning.”

The entity was patient. It had time to spare.

■

Saint swayed slightly in his seat.

The information continued to stream in along a dozen different channels.

Too much. It was too much, but somehow, somewhere along the line, they’d succeeded.

Jack was contained. Things were quiet.

Until he noted someone bludgeoning their way through Dragon’s password security. A series of personal questions, ranging from a favorite texture to something about a pet name for Dragon to a question about the first results of the ten by ten game.

The first two were answered in order.

Defiant? Getting access to the system?

No, too crude, too obvious.

The individual stalled on the last question.

He waited a few long moments, then saw the same individual making calls to Defiant. Three communiques, initiated within one or two seconds of one another. Then emails, to the PRT and Defiant both.

Saint intercepted it.

“Fuck, finally!”

“What are you trying, Tat-“

“Shut up and listen, douchestain. It’s Scion. He’s the point where it all catalyzes! And I just clued into the fact that he can probably sense Jack! Get Grue back to the area, blanket Jack in darkness, now! Now, now, now!”

“Mags!” he shouted. “Dobrynja! Get Grue back to the scene now! This is it!”

“On it!” the reply came back. There was a pause. “Grue is four miles away!”

“Teleporter,” he said.

“We don’t have any that survived the last few Endbringer fights!”

Saint hesitated.

Too far, it would be too late.

The woman who claimed she could control Scion.

His tired fingers flew over the keyboard. He dug up the file.

It had been seen to. They’d taken her name, but there’d been no proof. Hearsay.

Hearsay was better than nothing.

The cyborg was piloting the closest Azazel. Controlling it could be seen as an attack. The cyborg would fight, wrestle him for control.

He opened up the window for a message, instead, even as he used the full access Dragon had for every camera, email and phone message to find this Lisette.

A Hail Mary, if there ever was one.

“Defiant,” he said, overriding everything in his way to open communications with the cyborg. “Help me.”

■

The entity followed the movements of the various individuals around the battlefield. More containment foam was being layered over the broadcaster, burying the area.

A noise, a blare that had people doubling over, covering their ears, started emanating from one of the craft.

The craft launched a second later, flying right for the time distortion.

It crashed into the area of warped time, wrapping forelimbs, tail and rear claw around the irregularly shaped feature.

The entity moved, and it broke through the time distortion effect with ease. The craft fell head over heels before propulsion kicked in. It had to fly in zig-zags to keep pace with the entity’s slow retreat from the scene.

“I- uh. You broke free. Okay, good. Leave. Run! Please go. I’m- I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to talk to you before. You never came back to that spot, and I could never reach you to talk to you. There was help you needed and I couldn’t give it. I went to authorities, and nobody believed me. But now, now maybe I can give you advice. We can work on this together? As a pair? Is that alright?“

The entity didn’t respond.

“I hope it’s alright,” she said.

The entity took flight, leaving it all behind.

Leave. Run.

It didn’t return to the task of saving lives. For a period, it only flew.

It stopped when it had circled the world twice, hovering over the ocean where it had first appeared.

The broadcaster had finished speaking just a moment before the craft had launched, oblivious to the blaring noise that had been intended to drown him out. What I don’t understand, is why a blank slate like you would default to doing good deeds, rescuing cats from trees. Why not turn to that violence, as our ancestors did? It drove them, just like it drives the basest and most monstrous ofour kind.

Had he known he had a listening ear? Had it merely been a struggle to continue doing what he’d instinctively done for decades?

The shards retained memories, motivated, pushed.

The entity looked to the future, looked to possible worlds, and it saw the ways this could have unfolded. It burned a year off of the entity’s life, but he had thousands to spare anyways.

There was a scene where the entity stood over the broadcaster’s corpse and ruminated on what had driven the male to such extremes. The shard wasn’t a particularly aggressive one.

A scene where the man died, and years passed, the entity slowly coming to the same conclusions as it observed the rest of the species.

The entity had done good deeds for years, at Kevin Norton’s suggestion, waiting and hoping for the reward, the realization. When none had occurred, it had simply kept doing what it had been doing. Seeking out alternatives wasn’t even in the realm of imagination, because imagination was something it lacked.

It had power, though, and if either the counterpart or the cycle had been intact, they could have filled in for that imagination.

Still, it could experiment.

It gathered its power, then aimed at the nearest, largest population center. Kevin Norton’s birthplace.

The golden light speared forth, and the island shattered, folding, parts of it rising from the ocean. Crumpled like paper in a fist.

The entity did not eliminate the smoke or the waves that followed. It simply let the aftermath occur.

The simulated human mind within the entity felt a glimmer of something at that. Pleasure? Relief? Satisfaction?

Something deeper inside, something primal, tied to memories back in the beginning, before the beginning, responded in a very similar fashion.

The entity extended its perceptions outward, felt the reaction, the outcry. It turned words around in its head, as if it were broadcasting to itself.

Scourge.

Extermination.

Extinction.

That last one was the one to fit.

An interesting experience. After so much focus on the species as a whole, the evolution and development of the shards, on the cycle…

In this, it almost felt like it was evolving as an individual, moment to moment.

The entity opened fire once again, and this time it struck out at the coastline on the opposite side of the ocean.

Theo exhaled slowly. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. Inhaling again, the smell of shit and blood was so heavy on the air it choked him. His suppressed cough was almost a grunt, almost a gag.

His eyes returned to the two bloodstained spikes that had been stabbed into the wall. It was the space where Nilbog had been crucified, apparently. Something dangled from one of them. A tendon, maybe, a vein, or a strip of meat. The goblin king had been torn down with enough haste and enough force that some part of him had been left behind.

He’d spent some time staring at the metal spike with flesh dangling from it. The others were busy. It made sense to take the time to strategize, to get equipment and gear in order, familiarize himself with every tool and technique this squad of capes had on hand.

Thing was, Theo didn’t want to, even as he knew it was the smart thing. The others seemed to recognize that and weren’t pushing him, weren’t approaching. Maybe they’d brush it off as a kind of meditative thinking, a mental preparation for the fight that was to come. Maybe they’d see it for what it really was. Avoidance.

Staring at the wall and trying not to think about anything was easier than looking down, seeing the dead members of the Slaughterhouse Nine, and maybe seeing Aster in the mess of bodies.

Being silent was easier than having to look the others in the eyes and pretend he was alright, risking that they’d offer some gentle, kind condolences, and he’d have to be stoic in the face of it.

Men weren’t supposed to cry. It would be disastrous, shattering their image of him, creating too much doubt at such a crucial juncture. He could imagine how they’d react. Some of them would be awkward. Defiant, maybe, would avert his eyes. Bitch might say something harsh.

Revel, probably, would be nice about it. Offer a pep talk, a hug, heartfelt words. Tecton would be much the same. Parian and Foil, even, might be kind, if he went by descriptions Weaver and others had offered of them and the little clues he’d seen in interacting with them.

The moment he pulled himself together, if he could pull himself together, Chevalier would be at his side, all business, outlining the situation in clear, defined ways. Framing it all into plans and setups that would put less stress on Theo, no doubt, but not in such a way that anyone could say anything about it.

Hoyden? Hard to say. She lived with this wall that she’d erected around herself. Layers of defenses, in bravado or being snarky or being sarcastic or aggressive or avoiding the situation. In combat situations or real life, Theo suspected there were very few things that really got to the heart of Hoyden. When they did, they hurt. How would she react to someone being vulnerable?

And then there was Weaver.

She was in the periphery of his vision, sitting on a computer case, staring down at the floor. As ever, her mannerisms were peculiar. She was so still. If it weren’t for the bugs, or the fact that her head would periodically move, as if she were looking over the dead, he might have thought she’d stopped, like a machine with the battery removed.

She would be assessing who was dead, who wasn’t, planning and adjusting her expectations for the coming fight, quite possibly. Probably.

In the midst of that, was Weaver thinking about Aster? The fact that she, either by aiming a gun and pulling the trigger or by giving the order to Revel and Foil, had killed a toddler?

Weaver was a hard person to deal with.

Taylor, not so much.

If that was all it was, he wouldn’t have worried so much.

There were other possibilities, ones that troubled him. What if he approached them, and nobody offered condolences at all? What if they accepted it as a cost of doing business, a necessity in dire circumstances?

What if he did show emotion, and none of his allies offered any emotional support at all?

Kayden had been the closest thing he had to a mother. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s game, then Theo suspected he might never have rated. He wasn’t her first priority. That would be Aster. Not her second. That was her mission, nebulous as it had been in recent years. He hesitated to believe that he’d even rated third place.

He struggled to convince himself he placed fourth or fifth, even.

But she’d been there. She’d shown kindness, had stepped between him and Father when the situation demanded it. There had been gentle moments, like the time they’d been watching television one morning and a cape had talked about how tinkers were their least favorite type of opponent to fight, and he and Kayden had laughed, because Kayden and her group had run into Leet just a week before.

Stupid things, in the end. Nonsensical. But stupid, nonsensical things were sometimes the most important.

He’d never had friends, before he got his powers. Even now, he wondered if he’d have really formed the friendships he had if they’d chanced to meet in some universe where powers didn’t exist.

Being alone as often as he had, Theo valued the connections he had made. Even connections with Justin, Dorothy and Geoff. Crusader, Night and Fog.

On the flip side of that same coin, he felt the betrayal of Justin leaving him behind.

Above all, he felt the quiet, perpetual horror of knowing that Crusader was still screaming, his throat never going raw, as Gray Boy’s loop continued without cease.

Kayden would be standing a short distance away, stoic, trying to keep from slowly going insane as Justin’s screams continued without end.

He’d lost people who were important to him, in maybe the most horrible way possible. He’d lost his father, and Kayden, Justin, Geoff and Dorothy, and now Aster. He’d lost them to violence and stupidity and madness, and he could see the allure in how the others seemed to be functioning, bottling it all inside.

He could see the twisted logic of it, even. As if there was a binary to everything, every enemy was somehow a twisted mess of emotion, layered by a seeming calmness, while every ally seemed to be cold inside, with only an act on the surface.

He looked down at his mask. A metal face with lenses over the eyes. Stoic, expression neutral, or a little stern. He’d chosen it at first because his real face was a little too round for a mask, but the PR teams had wanted to get more faces on the team. He’d compromised, and hadn’t given his mask much thought beyond that.

Except time had passed, and he’d found himself wondering if he liked the message it conveyed. By necessity, capes went down a road where they had to become cold and unflinching. They had to become numb, had to inure themselves to hard decisions. It jarred, to wear a mask that seemed to symbolize that transition, that while wanting nothing less than to walk down that road.

Back in Brockton Bay, New Wave had tried to start something, capes without masks. It had been disastrous. The message had been lost in the ensuing celebrity, and that had only intensified after one of the core members of the group was found and killed in her civilian identity.

He wondered if they’d been right to try. If capes really needed to just… drop the mask. To cry and let the feelings out. So many got their powers through trauma, but they bottled themselves up, erected defenses, developed coping mechanisms. If New Wave’s idea had taken off, would things be better?

Didn’t matter. Here they stood.

He could make it through this, save the world. They could find the source of the Endbringers and defeat them, could clean things up, get things in order and stop all of the real monsters… he could go to college, get a career and find a girl and marry her, and at the end of the day, Justin would still be screaming.

Aster would still be dead.

The ugly decisions would have been made.

He stared up at the bloody spikes in the wall, an image that would be burned into his mind’s eye, remembered as the point he stood at the threshold. A mirror to where he’d been in the beginning, when he’d met Jack.

Bitch paced around the edges of the room, impatient. She’d had to shrink her dogs to get them to an appropriate size, and was keeping them small in case the portal wasn’t accommodating enough. Here and there, she barked out orders to get the animals away from the bodies.

It grated.

“None of those invisible fucks,” she said.

“Okay,” Weaver answered. Her voice was quiet.

Theo almost took her voice as a cue to reevaluate how she was reacting to what had just happened, then stopped himself. Losing battle. No point.

Then, for some bizarre reason, Bitch approached him.

A sleek Doberman nudged at his gauntlet with its nose. He looked down and then scratched it behind the ear. It didn’t matter if the dog bit him – he was wearing a gauntlet.

When he looked up, he could see Bitch staring at him. Her face was barely visible behind her hair.

“Can I help you?” he asked. His voice came out harder than he intended.

She didn’t seem to notice or care. “You’re her friend, aren’t you?”

I don’t want to talk about Weaver.

He didn’t venture an answer. He couldn’t say yes, not honestly, but he suspected Weaver had a different answer to the question.

“You’re both acting different. I can see it.”

“Kind of warranted, in this situation,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice, the last few members of my family just got killed. I just need a bit of time alone to think.”

His voice had almost broken. Couldn’t break down. Not like this, here, with her.

She hadn’t taken his hint.

“They were buttholes, weren’t they? Purity and her gang. The nazis.”

The dog nudged his hand again. He gave it a more intense scratch before answering, “White supremacists. They… weren’t the best people ever. But they were still my family.”

She kept looking at him, almost glaring. She didn’t answer or elaborate, leaving the conversation to die.

Go away. I don’t want to hit you.

He kept silent, hoping she would just leave. Willing her to leave.

“Stay, Huntress,” she ordered.

Then she walked away, leaving the dog at his side.

Theo scratched the animal under the collar, and watched it crane its head to one side, enjoying the contact.

It helped, oddly enough. Having contact with another living creature without all of the issues and hassles of dealing with people. No judgement, no worries, just… this. Being alone without being alone.

His father had always preferred cats, and the creatures had never been easy to bond with. This was nice.

Theo sighed. He glanced at Weaver in his peripheral vision, and saw that there was a dog sitting next to her. A mutt, at a glance. The animal was resting its chin on her shoulder.

She saw him looking, glanced at Bitch, who was walking with her husky puppy following behind her, then shrugged.

He lowered his eyes from Weaver… no, from Taylor, then scratched Huntress again.

“We have the coordinates. Waiting for a charge,” Defiant announced. He was already flanked by the Dragon’s Teeth he’d brought with him.

“All gather,” Chevalier ordered.

Bitch snapped her fingers twice, and her dogs returned to her.

Theo raised his hands to his face to rub his eyes, and he felt damp on one cheek. One tear, fresh. He wiped his face, glancing around to check if anyone had seen it. No, not judging by the angle.

Weaver spoke up, “I noted Shatterbirds and Burnscars leaving, some Damsels, bunch of others I didn’t catch, but they had weapons and I’m thinking Winter or Crimson. There were some I parsed as hostages, but it’s only in retrospect that I’m thinking they were Nice Guys.”

“The second group made their way to New York.”

“Bonesaw and a captive Nilbog that’s apparently rigged to create things on demand,” Weaver said. “Crawlers, Breeds and a handful of others I didn’t identify.”

Chevalier reacted to that, flinching.

His city, Golem thought.

“And the last group headed to Los Angeles.”

“Jack’s group?” Golem asked.

“Yes,” Weaver said. “He brought the Siberian, Hookwolf, Gray Boy, all eight Harbingers, and there are Psychosomas and Nyxes. One or two others I didn’t place.”

“Los Angeles?” Chevalier asked. “What area?”

“That area,” Defiant answered, looking at the computer.

Chevalier nodded slowly.

Golem stared at the screen. He could see the satellite image, the concentric circles that marked the area around the blinking blue dot.

“Charge prepared. We can send one group at a time. They’ve already got a twelve minute headstart. It’ll be another eight minutes before we can send the second group, eight minutes after that before we can send the third.”

“The first group to arrive can call for help and get support to the other locations,” Chevalier said.

“Then why split up?” Weaver asked. “We should all hit Jack’s group, trust others to help in New York and Houston.”

“Everyone else is closer to New York,” Chevalier said. “But Houston…”

“We can call in favors,” Weaver said. “Moord Nag’s apparently on board, though we don’t know why. Cauldron’s on board. If we can get Tattletale in contact with them, that’s handled. But we can’t do that unless we leave.”

“That’s my city,” Hoyden said.

“I get that,” Weaver replied, “But we’re doing nothing constructive if we split up, and we’re definitely doing nothing constructive as long as we sit here.”

“I get that,” Weaver said, “But two or three of us aren’t going to do anything special. We need big guns.”

Golem closed his eyes.

There she is. Weaver.

“She’s right,” Chevalier said, looking at Hoyden. “We’ll send every set of reinforcements we can, but it’s not worth what it costs us, to break up our group.”

“Shit,” Foil said.

Hoyden had gone stiff, bristling for an argument.

“I’m not saying we should abandon Houston,” Weaver said, before Hoyden could speak. “Defiant, can you postpone the collapse of this area?”

“Yes, but I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” he responded.

“I think you should,” she said. “Toybox left enough stuff behind. Use it. Stay behind, arm yourself, then throw everything but the kitchen sink at them. You remember how the scar formed in Brockton Bay?”

Golem looked around the group, saw the expressions on faces, saw how even Hoyden had relaxed a fraction. Even the Dragon’s Tooth officers that accompanied them were a little more at ease. There were no answers in this situation, but there was a possibility. An option, vague as it was.

“Okay,” Defiant said.

Then, without so much as a farewell or a ‘good luck’, he hit the enter key.

■

Golem appeared a full four feet above the ground. He hit the ground and let his legs sink in, absorbing some of the fall. A second later, he pushed himself out.

Just the use of his power gave him a sense of the area. Touching the pavement gave him a sense of how all of the pavement around him was organized. It had been folded into itself, folded around, thinned, thickened, bent at right angles.

Looking around, he could see how the buildings had been altered. Textures had been removed, similar materials blended into one another, everything fortified, thickened, weaponized.

All around them, the buildings were like tombstones. Windowless, angular, all expression and human touches removed from them. Spikes studded corners and blocked alleyways, criss-crossed in front of doors, and carpeted pathways. Some were metal, others camouflaged.

They’d figured out how to fight Tohu and Bohu during the Los Angeles attack. The trick was responding quickly, stopping them before Tohu had her masks and Bohu managed her influence. They’d won, for lack of a better term, managing the fight without the casualties they’d seen in the prior attack, but they’d still lost a chunk of the city in the time it took them to beat and batter the towering Bohu into submission. Now Santa Fe Springs and all of the neighboring districts were uninhabitable, due to the traps that riddled it, the way the infrastructure had been completely and totally compromised.

Easier to found a new habitable area than to try to fix this, routing new pipes and power, managing traps both subtle and blatant.

Those same traps would be a problem here, but they weren’t entirely incapable. They’d dealt with this before.

“HQ, come in,” Chevalier murmured. He continued to speak, delivering the information about Jack and the target areas.

“Area’s empty,” Weaver said.

“A trap,” Golem responded. “Has to be.”

“Has to be. Why else come here?” Foil asked.

“Nyx illusions,” Tecton said, “He doesn’t know we’re aware of who he brought, so he’s set them up to stall us.”

Nyx. Her gas is concentrated into solid shapes that move at her will. Break that shape and it becomes a cloud of poisonous gas.

“Not that easy,” Weaver said. “Maybe he knows we know, and it’s a double-bluff.”

“Parian?” Weaver asked.

Parian nodded. She unfurled the bundle of cloth from her back, then quickly shaped it into a roughly humanoid shape.

A moment later, it was stomping ahead, forging the way.

Golem fell in step beside Tecton. Every footfall on a surface concentrated his awareness, informing him of every surface of a matching material in the area. Lightning flashes in his consciousness, showing the landscape around him. He deliberately stepped on other materials to inform himself on concrete, on brick, on steel and glass. His heavy boots made for a rhythmic sound, accompanied by the sounds of Chevalier and Tecton’s own heavy footfalls, and the rougher patter of the mutant dogs.

“Stop.”

A girl’s voice, over the comm system. Not Tattletale.

“Golem, tell them to stop. Now.”

“Stop,” he said.

A second later, he wondered if he should mention this phantom voice. A trick on Screamer’s part?

“Thirty one,” she said.

“Thirty one?”

“More uses of my power. I’ve been testing it, straining it, figuring out my limits. I can’t make promises. Might be less. Might be able to squeeze out more. But it’s the best I can give you.“

The numbers clued him in, belatedly.

Dinah Alcott.

“There’s bigger problems,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “In two minutes, everyone but you dies. Seventy-two percent chance.“

He stopped short.

“Golem?” Hoyden asked.

“Solution?” he asked, he raised a hand.

“Can you think in abstracts?”

“Abstracts.”

“You’re… kind of scaring me, Golem my boy,” Hoyden said.

“He’s talking to someone in the comms,” Weaver said. “Tattletale? Not Tattletale.”

“Red means forward, left, attack, team. Blue means back, right, retreat, solo… I can only ask a certain number of questions a day. Ask, I can narrow it down, but it’s less help I can give later.”

One keyword, and he had to figure out what option it led to.

“Blue, Tecton.Retreat.”

“Back up,” he said.

Collectively, they retreated several steps.

A moment later, one small group of the Nine appeared, pushing their way through solid doorways, leaving colored smoke in their wakes.

Each was young. Teenagers. Each had a matching mask, a snarling face, complete with fangs and glowing dots in the dark eye sockets. Their clothing flowed, with hoods peaking above their heads. Each carried a different improvised weapon. A fire axe. A two-handed shovel. A makeshift spear.

Parian’s doll reached out, and the Harbingers slipped out of the way of the hands, dodging by virtual hairs as they spun in tight circles, ducked and rolled. It was like the thing was moving in slow motion, but it wasn’t.

A fire axe and two kitchen knives slid through the creature’s body, severing seams. It deflated explosively.

Foil opened fire with her crossbow, aiming so it was on a path to hit two of the enemies, and the Harbingers dodged the shot.

She’s not supposed to miss.

Tecton shattered the ground, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. The Harbingers didn’t slow down.

They turned to run, belatedly.

Hoyden and Chevalier held their ground as others mounted dogs or took flight. Golem ran his fingertips along the panels at his armor, feeling the connections to the various substances around him flare, touched the one for pavement.

He thrust his hand inside. A small hand, emerging as fast as he could shove his hand inside the panel. He reached for the closest Harbinger’s foot.

The young villain pulled his leg up out of the way, virtually spinning as he stepped to the side, planted the same foot on solid ground, then resumed his forward momentum. No luck. It was like Harbinger could see it coming.

Weaver’s bugs were swarming the Harbingers, but they took to spinning, relying on the movement of their hoods and the flowing black clothes to drive the bugs away, batting them aside. Even the threads seemed to fail to do anything substantial, getting caught up in the approaching villains as they moved.

Like whirling dervishes, they closed the distance.

He thrust his hand into the pavement again, and this time, he created a platform like the one he’d fashioned in Ellisburg. Raising them up off the ground, out of reach.

If there was any difficulty getting down and resuming their search for Jack, he’d deal with that when they weren’t all about to be murdered.

The Harbingers scaled the sides of buildings as if they were running across horizontal terrain. Weapons, fingers and boots found traction in the surfaces, and they climbed with an easy, almost eerie ease, as though they were almost floating.

Climbing faster than the hand was rising.

Three reached the top of the building, and as if they’d coordinated, planned this well in advance, they set foot on the edge of the rooftop and kicked off. They ignored the bugs that plagued them as if they weren’t even there, weren’t binding them with silk.

They flipped heel over head, their backs to Golem, Hoyden, Tecton and Chevalier, the two Dragon’s Teeth. Rachel, Parian and Foil were on the dog’s backs, and Weaver was airborne.

The Dragon’s Teeth aimed containment foam at the three Harbingers. The clones pulled off their flowing jackets with sleeves that almost covered their hands, catching the foam, then landed. One swept the bundle of foam to try to knock a D.T. officer off his feet. The officer hopped up, then struck out at the Harbinger clone.

No use, Golem thought. A mistake. Harbinger caught the arm, almost effortlessly turned around, pulling him in the direction of the turn. A little push, and the soldier fell.

“He’s okay,” Dinah said. “Blue!”

Run, retreat. As if there was a place to go.

Two attacks struck in concert, a kitchen knife and a fire axe, and a heavy piece of Tecton’s armor was decimated, one gauntlet ruined.

No use.

One more landed on the heel of the hand.

Revel opened fire with a dozen orbs, but the enemy avoided them with an almost casual ease. She reprogrammed them, altering the orbs’ properties, and this time they homed in on their targets. The Harbingers dodged them, used the changed trajectories to lure them into nearly striking the D.T. officer and Chevalier. She stopped, hanging back.

Chevalier swung his sword, pulled the trigger mid-swing to shoot at one Harbinger that stood on a fingertip of the reaching hand-platform. Both attacks missed.

The Harbinger closest to him stepped close, almost casually, and drove a paring knife through a slit in Chevalier’s visor.

His good eye, Golem realized.

Nobody had figured out Harbinger’s power, before Harbinger disappeared off the face of the planet. It was an ugly reality that such questions weren’t always answered. The best guess suggested a hyperawareness of space and the movements of their own bodies.

But being able to figure out that Chevalier was half-blind, being able to blind his good eye?

One stepped close, holding a ball-peen hammer in each hand. He closed on Golem, invading his personal space, until their noses were touching.

Golem tried to wrap the Harbinger in a bear-hug, felt only the faint drag of cloth against the metal of his gauntlets, empty air. His intended target had ducked low.

He drove a knee forward. Tight, contained movements, give them as little to work with as possible.

No contact. Of course.

He was rewarded with a swat of the hammer against his mask, shattering one lens. He’d thought he was out of reach, but the boy held only the very end of the hammer between index and middle finger. He tossed the hammer in the air, letting it spin head over end.

Golem struck at the flying hammer, but another strike of the hammer caught his arm. His fingertips fell short, and the handle of the weapon rolled over the back of his hand. The Harbinger caught it, then thrust it forward in the same motion, driving the top of the hammer against Golem’s nose.

“Don’t kill him,” another Harbinger said.

“I know,” was the reply.

They didn’t even sound winded.

None of the others were doing demonstrably better. The remaining D.T. officer was holding his own, but the others were being slowly, systematically beaten.

He’s dragging it out. They’re making this into a game.

No use letting this go on.

He retreated, only to find one Harbinger sticking a foot out, planting a foot on the small of his back. He was pushed forward, then promptly struck in the abdomen.

Rather than try to defend himself, he tucked his chin to his collar-bone, let himself fall, and thrust his hands into the armor panels for pavement.

Double-thrust, one hand extending from the other, pushing Chevalier off the hand.

Another motion, simultaneous, to bring a hand of stone out of the wall behind Chevalier. It emerged slower, but it formed a shelf, and Chevalier landed on that ledge.

The Harbingers could dodge, but his teammates were valid targets.

Another thrust, this time for himself.

Selfish, maybe, but he couldn’t save anyone if they were interfering with him.

One struck at his leg as he launched himself off the hand. It altered his trajectory, put him on a course where there wasn’t anything nearby to catch himself with.

Two hands, into brick. One connected to the other. While they were new, he could move them. Trouble with having them against the side of his body was that he couldn’t get a full range of movement like he could get with his arms. No matter. He caught himself by the mask, then pulled himself closer to the building.

Another hand, another shelf.

Hoyden exploded, but the Harbingers didn’t get hurt. They spun, spreading the damage around like a person might roll to absorb a fall, ducking and sidestepping to put themselves at the periphery of the effect.

“Scion’s closing in,” Dinah said. “Blue, Golem. It’s still blue. I can’t use my power too many times today, but your numbers are getting worse and the answer keeps turning up blue. Retreat, go right, go solo or go back.“

“Someone needs to intercept Scion,” Weaver said, over the comm system. “We can’t have him get involved.“

“You go,” Chevalier said.

Golem searched the sky, then spotted Weaver at the fringe of the battle, surrounded by a cloud of bugs.

She took off.

Golem grit his teeth. More immediate things to focus on. He tried to launch Tecton to freedom, but the Harbingers intercepted him, driving Tecton out of the way in the same instant the hand appeared.

The D.T. soldier managed to deliver a glancing blow. Golem couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not, because the hit was followed by the D.T. soldier being caught with a length of cloth wound around one wrist.

Tecton stepped in, drawing attention and striking out with his gauntlets, one damaged and one intact. It bought the D.T. soldier some room.

Golem took the opportunity to launch the soldier to safety.

There were others on the ground, approaching.

One of these bastards could probably take us apart. Eight of them, we can’t hurt them, we’re losing time, burning resources.

Tecton glanced at Hoyden. A communication seemed to pass between them.

They struck the palm of the hand, and the entire thing shattered.

Hoyden, Tecton and five of the Harbingers descended with a shower of rubble.

Hoyden and Tecton broke their fall with uses of their respective powers. Hoyden hit the ground to generate an explosion. Tecton punched the earth with his piledriver in the instant he reached solid ground.

The Harbingers didn’t have that ability. A five-story drop. People had died or been seriously hurt after a three-story drop.

Nobody told them that. In the midst of the thin cloud of dust and the chunks of debris, the Harbingers moved without wincing or giving any sign of pain, their black-clothed forms rising from the ground like spectres.

“Talk to me, Dinah,” Golem said.

“Situation’s getting worse. Numbers are getting worse, across the board. I’m not asking any specific questions, but I can sense it, just… the big picture. It’s not working.“

There’s an answer here, and we can’t see it.

“Blue… Backwards, go right, retreat, solo? What’s that last one?”

“Abstracts. Nothing specific. It’s only as meaningful as it helps you come to the right decision.”

He stared at Hoyden and Tecton, surrounded by the eight Harbingers.

“If I leave… how does that change the numbers?”

“Success.”

“Chances for Tecton and the others?”

“Better than they were.”

This was hell, Golem mused. This was the nightmare that had driven Weaver from her home city, drove her to surrender.

The right path, but god damn, did it look ugly.

He bit his lip, then formed another pair of connected hands to launch himself skyward. He reached the apex of his flight, then created a shelf to land on. He did it again, and this time the shelf he created was just at the edge of the roof. He stepped over onto the rooftop, then broke into a run.

“Saving Tecton, red or blue.”

“Golem, we didn’t get a chance to go over this earlier, but you need to know… I can’t ask that many questions. I’ve been saving my power for the last big confrontation. Tattletale said this is the time to act. I used my power twice to answer big questions earlier today. Another three to figure out who I needed to talk to, and that told me-“

She couldn’t read his mind, so it was only identifying options. Everything to the left of his nose was blue, everything to the right was red.

“Red or blue. Now.”

“Blue. Twenty-five.“

“Jack’s to my left,” he said. He turned ninety degrees. “Again.”

“Blue. I’m- My power’s getting fuzzier.”

Scion.

He looked up at the sky. Weaver with her swarm was there, forming a great wall across the sky, as if to draw attention to herself. Scion was approaching, a ray of golden light streaking across the overcast sky above.

Scion shut down precog abilities.

He felt something knot in his stomach, an ugly feeling, ominous.

“Let’s get as much use out of it as possible. Saving Tecton and the others… Red or blue!”

“Red. Twenty-three.”

He hesitated. “It’s not me going back?”

“No. I don’t think so. I just asked and it said no.”

Break it down. Attack, left for blue. Group, forward for red. “Again.”

“Golem, we can’t waste questions like this. We-“

“Please.”

“Red.”

Group or forward, he thought, assigning colors to each option. “Again.”

High above, Scion reached a stop, hovering in front of Weaver, who hung in the air in turn, using her flight pack.

Golem tore his eyes away from the scene. He glanced down at the street, where Bitch, Parian and Foil were reinforcing Tecton and Hoyden, backing them up as the Harbingers approached. One Harbinger threw something, and a dog dropped like its heart had stopped.

He shook his head. He could watch forever, but they were better served by having him elsewhere.

The sooner he got Jack, the better.

“Jack is southwest of my location,” he reported. “Heading off solo on precog advisement.”

He bolted, running. His power bridged gaps between buildings. He set his foot down on the corner of one rooftop, then vaulted himself over a trap that he sensed just a foot in front of him. His landing jarred it into motion, provoking a deadfall, a slice of building that toppled and dropped onto the narrow street below.

Another hand broke a row of spikes that lined the edge of another rooftop.

Once, he’d been fat. Once, he’d been out of shape. Two years and a mission had given him the chance to remedy that. He wasn’t conventionally fit, still had a bit of stockiness to him, but the fat was gone. He had muscle. Running with Weaver had made this doable.

Twenty more precog answers.

“Numbers if I stay on the rooftops?”

“Twenty to thirty percent chance of injury or being taken out of action.”

“If I’m on the ground?”

“Fifty-something. Eighteen questions left.”

Her numbers were getting less accurate, the picture of the situation cloudier.

Too many powerful individuals in the area, too many chances of disaster, too many unknowns.

He set foot on one rooftop that had changed less than most, and the lightning flash was a staggered one, as his feet first touched gravel, then the material of the rooftop beneath that gravel.

The next rooftop wasn’t made of either material. It wasn’t made of brick or concrete.

He created two hands, chaining them together, and extended the hand into the building.

It detonated into a massive cloud of smoke.

He launched himself away to avoid it, but it wasn’t enough. The smoke flowed towards him like a wall, too vast to avoid.

Too vast to avoid so long as he remained on the rooftop. He shoved himself off, created more hands to form a series of ledges that might serve as a staircase.

The smoke still loomed.

He got as close to the ground as he could, then launched himself to safety.

Golem was panting as he rested on the ground. Psychosoma’s monsters emerged from the smoke, one using the same ledges he’d created to descend, the other crawling on the outside of the building. Homeless, to look at them, twisted into monstrous shapes. False shapes. He could deal enough damage and break the effect, and they’d be human again, unhurt.

Simpler than it sounded. If he broke the effect for one, the other would tear the freed victim apart.

Golem rose to his feet, backing away as swiftly as he could. He was out of reach of the smoke, but these things, they were a distraction, a speed bump.

He waited, dropping into a fighting stance as they approached. They broke into runs, charging him blindly, two figures so thin they didn’t look real, their fingers and feet twisted into claws as long as his forearm.

They plummeted into a pit in the middle of the road.

Golem rose from the fighting stance, then hurried on. His footsteps continued to mark the surfaces around him, making it clear where there were more of Nyx’s illusions, more traps left over from the Tohu-Bohu attack.

His other enemies wouldn’t be so gullible.

“Left or right?” he asked. He had a mental map of the surroundings.

“Left. Somewhere around a ninety percent chance Jack’s in that direction.”

Each question narrowed down the possibilities. From fifty percent of the area to twenty-five percent, then twelve and a half percent… now six percent. It was a small enough slice that he didn’t need to wonder as much. If he kept on this course, he could find his target.

“Right route,” Dinah said. “It’s… it’s really fuzzy, but I still feel like the bloody, ugly ends aren’t so close.”

“The others are… okay,” Dinah replied. “Defiant just arrived in Houston with a giant robot that only has one arm and one leg, and we’ve got…”

Dinah’s voice continued, but he didn’t hear it.

Golem slowed to a walk as he saw his new surroundings. The tombstones of Bohu’s area were still here, but they were scarred.

A thousand times a thousand cuts.

“Theodore,” Jack said.

Jack emerged, and he wasn’t holding a knife. He held a sword, nearly four feet long. A claymore. His shirt was unbuttoned, showing a body without a trace of fat. His beard had been meticulously trimmed, but that had easily been a day ago. His neck had scruff on it. Strands of dark hair fell across eyes with lines in the corner as he stared at Golem.

Golem had gotten this far.

Now what?

Jack let the blade’s point swing idly at calf-level, pointed off to one side. Cuts gouged the road’s surface. Theo let his fingers trace the panels on his armor. Steel, iron, aluminum, woods, stone…

His second sense marked various items in the surrounding area that were made of the same substance, even marked the trap off to his left, but it didn’t touch any part of the sword.

“All on your lonesome,” Jack said.

“Yes,” Theo answered, sounding braver than he felt.

His finger touched other panels. Brick, asphalt, concrete, porcelain…

The sword remained out of his power’s reach. He’d put so much stock in being able to disarm Jack.

With each contact, he felt the accompanying flashes, tried to put together a mental picture of his surroundings.

Two false building faces, just a little ahead of him. They had to be Nyx-made. If he advanced, she’d break the illusion, and he’d be surrounded in the noxious smoke. At best, he’d pass out. At worst, he’d pass out and wake up to permanent brain damage and organ failure. Or being in the clutches of the Nine.

Jack let the sword swing, and Golem tensed. The blade didn’t come anywhere close to pointing at him, but Jack’s power cut shallow gouges into the surrounding brick, stone and pavement.

“Alone,” Jack said, again.

Because of you, Golem thought.

He clenched his fist.

Tears were forming in his eyes. Ridiculous. Wasn’t supposed to be what happened in this kind of situation.

Jack, in turn, smiled slowly. “Quiet. I was thinking that after all this time, we could have some witty banter. You can scream your fury at me, curse me for killing your loved ones. Then you do your best to tear me apart.”

“No.”

“Oh!” Jack smiled wider. “Show mercy, then? Walk away from the fight and show you’re the better man, rather than descending to my level? I’ve been waiting for someone to pull that ever since I saw it happen in a movie.”

Or was this Jack an illusion? Nyx could imitate voices. She could create the gouges in the walls by way of the illusory smoke.

Golem paced a little too, mirroring Jack’s movements.

“Well, I’m not sure what you expect, then, Theodore. The fat little boy promised me he’d become the kind of hero that would put down monsters like me. I gave you two years, and you’ve made it at least partway. Did you change your mind on the killing part?”

“No. I will kill you.”

“So tough! So brave! All of this from the-”

“Stop talking, Jack. You’re not that clever, not as sharp as you like to think. You talked to me about keystones? Bullshit. You’re a sad, pathetic killer with delusions of grandeur.”

Jack’s smile dropped from his face. He held the Claymore with one hand, the blade’s point touching the ground, and spread his arms. His unbuttoned shirt parted, showing the whole of his bare shirt and stomach. Showing himself to be vulnerable, exposed.

“Then do your worst, Theodore. Because if you don’t, I will.”

“Dinah,” he whispered.

“With you. Gray boy isn’t near. Nyx and Hookwolf are. Fifteen questions. I had to use one to help the others.”

He nodded slowly.

I don’t like the illusory building faces. Too much poisonous smoke was needed to make that sort of thing, it had to be multiple Nyxes working in concert. They’d be close, probably.

Which said nothing of the other threats that loomed behind the fog. Psychosoma’s creations?

Golem reached up to his gloves, then tore off the protectors on his knuckles. They fell to the ground. Beneath were spikes.

“Nice touch,” Jack said.

Golem spread his arms. “What do you-”

“Red.”

Mid-sentence, still talking, he let his arms fall, driving them into panels at his side.

Jack hopped back out of reach of the hands, seizing his sword. He drew it back.

“Blue.”

Golem created another hand. Not to catch Jack, but to catch the blade.

It had backfired, if anything. The hand caught the tip of the blade, but the sword slid free of the grip and flew around with more force. Golem leaped back, letting himself fall, and let his feet slide into the pavement. Two boots rose from the ground, shielding him as the slash caught the surface.

Weaver’s lessons. Catching the enemy off guard by any means necessary, rolling with the punches, or rolling with the effects of the enemy’s attack.

Had to use Dinah’s ability, divide everything into two equally viable actions, so he wasn’t caught off guard.

Still prone, still shielded and out of sight, he reached into the ground with both hands.

Two hands, flattened, jabbed for Jack’s leg, stabbing at ankle and calf. Jack backed away again before they made contact, slashed again.

This time, the slash caught a section of Golem’s armor that was sticking out of cover. The cut made a mark nearly a foot deep in the ground, but it served only to split the pauldron in half. A section of metal fell to the ground.

He created two connected hands of pavement, then whipped them to throw the section of pauldron at Jack. The trajectory suggested it would fly a little to Jack’s left.

Golem jabbed one hand into the ground, and a flattened hand stabbed out from the spinning piece of metal, extending as the projectile flew.

Jack ducked, but Golem was already thrusting his other hand into the earth. It jutted from the hand he’d created, doubling the length in short order. More of a crude boomerang in shape than a chunk of metal.

It only clipped Jack, just barely.

“Clever boy,” Jack said. “You-”

“Stop talking, Jack,” Golem responded.

For Aster, for Kayden, even for the others…

He thrust his hands into the ground, repeatedly, and they stabbed at the underside of Jack’s feet. He leaped back out of reach and swung his sword the instant he touched ground.

The action cut through the remainder of the shield Golem had raised, but it also kept Jack in one place. He caught the underside of Jack’s foot. Jack stumbled as he pulled himself free of Golem’s grip.

He reached out to stab out with two interconnected hands, the same technique he used to launch himself.

But Jack evaded it, slid out of the way, almost as if he knew the strike was coming.

Golem moved to get into a position to strike again, and realized in the moment that it would take too long.

He was crouched, still, his hands remained buried, and Jack was already drawing his sword back. He couldn’t mount a defense in time.

He braced himself. With luck, his armor could take it.

The attack didn’t come.

No. Jack laughed, instead. His icy blue eyes were fixed at a point beyond Golem.

Golem chanced a look over his shoulder.

He saw a figure dropping out of the sky, trailed by what looked like a comet’s trail of black shapes. Weaver. Her course changed as she flew away, using the Bohu-warped buildings for cover.

And where she’d been, just moments ago, a dull gray light hung in the sky.

Scion. Trapped in Gray Boy’s time-well.

Jack’s laugh rang through the area.

The figure inside moved, but only barely. The well trapped powers within. Kayden’s lasers wouldn’t exit the area. Crusader’s duplicates wouldn’t be able to wander beyond the well’s limits.

And Scion didn’t appear to be any different.

“I’m sorry, my boy,” Jack said.

Golem whipped his head around. Jack had backed up a short distance.

Jack chuckled, as if he still found something funny about the situation. “Ah well. I’m disappointed. I’m not sensing it, your killer instinct.”

“I’m prepared to finish you,” Golem said.

“You’re prepared? Maybe. But not practiced. No. I don’t see this going anywhere interesting. It’s about the ripples. You remember our conversation?”

Theo nodded slowly. The ripples from a butterfly’s wing. The effects that extend out from any event.

Golem chanced another look. Nothing had changed. Scion remained fixed in place.

“That interests me.”

He climbed to his feet, eyes on Jack’s weapon.

Jack reached into his belt, then drew a knife.

Golem tensed. Faster than the sword, if not quite so capable of chewing through his armor.

But Jack didn’t attack him. He struck at the building faces.

The surfaces dissolved into rolling clouds of smoke. Golem vaulted himself back twice in quick succession to escape it, then continued to back away for good measure.

“You’ve failed to amuse me. A shame your sister’s been shot, and there’s nothing interesting to do with the hostages,” Jack called out, his voice ringing along the length of the street. With no details or features on the outsides of the buildings Bohu had altered, the voice carried in an odd way.

A shadow emerged. Jack, riding atop a massive six-legged beast.

As Jack approached, he became more visible, and the nature of the beast became clear. He stood on Hookwolf’s back, between the creature’s shoulders.

Other shadows appeared in the mist, and they, in turn, clarified as they approached. Crawlers. Mannequins. Crimsons. Others.

Done in by my dad’s lieutenant, Golem thought. No way he was walking away from this.

“I suppose we’ll kill you,” Jack said. “And you’ll just have to take me on my word when I say I’ll find something suitably horrific to do as punishment for your failing our little game.”

Theo raised a hand as a shield even before Jack used his power in conjunction with Hookwolf’s. A hand of pavement, struck by a thousand slashes in a matter of a second, whittled to nothing. Then he had only armor, and that, too, started to come apart.

Unholy screams and screeches followed us as we made our retreat, landing beyond the walls of Ellisburg. In moments, Nilbog’s fairy wonderland had become a hell on earth, thousands of demons crawling from the literal woodwork to attack. The ground split as subterranean creatures emerged, while others climbed out of buildings that seemed to have been built around them. One was somewhere between a dragon and a gargoyle in appearance. Big, leathery wings, with a gnarled body and a leering, fanged face.

The flying creatures, the gargoyle-dragon included, took flight perching atop the walls, then backed down as a barrage of gunfire and superpowered attacks assaulted them.

“Shuffle!” Revel cried out her lieutenant’s name.

Shuffle stepped forward and used his power. Teleportation, but not teleportation of living things. Not people, anyways. Grass didn’t hinder him much.

He teleported the landscape. A hill was bisected and placed against the ruined entrance of the facility.

His power was unpredictable. There were metrics he couldn’t quite grasp or understand. Teleporting things in sometimes teleported things out. In attempting to shore up the wall, he created gaps.

But this was a known issue, one he’d been dealing with for some time. Unsurprised, he fixed the resulting hole with two more followup teleports. If any terrain was removed, it was inside the structure, unimportant.

Something inside Goblintown struck the wall, hard, and then started clawing at it. I could sense it’s silhouette with the few bugs I had near the area. It was four-legged, with all of the most effective parts of a rhino, bear and elephant combined, and it was big enough that I suspected it could make its way through the great concrete wall.

Defending capes had gathered in a loose ring around Ellisburg. Revel and Shuffle were among them, which I took to be a sign that Golem’s group had handled whatever issues had arisen in Norfolk. The heroes opened fire as the gargoyle-dragon thing explored the upper edge of the wall again, and it disappeared, only to make an appearance further down, trying to find a spot where the defensive line was weaker.

This was the worst case scenario, on so many levels. We couldn’t afford to be dealing with this.

“Two more attacks,” Revel said. “Just minutes ago. Two different cities. The situation in Redfield is still ongoing, which means we have three crisis situations set up by the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

“Four, if you count this,” Shuffle said.

The creature hit the wall again. Shuffle shored it up, placing the other half of the hill against it.

“This is getting out of control,” Revel said.

“You’re implying we had control,” Jouster said. He stood off to one side, with the defensive line of capes.

“More out of control,” she said.

I’d been placed on the ground as the capes landed. I was aware that someone was checking me for injuries, but it seemed secondary. I stared up at the overcast sky, watching the rare raindrop tap the lens of my mask. My mind was whirling while my swarm was feeding me information on the ongoing fight, both inside and outside the walls.

I stirred as I heard Golem’s voice. He was sitting a short distance from me. “This is my fault.”

“It was a lose-lose situation,” I said. I moved my arm to allow the medic to check my ribs. “Jack set it up this way.”

“I could have done something. Said something different.”

“No. We played the cards we had available, it wasn’t enough. Bonesaw’s power and Siberian’s invulnerability made for ugly trump cards.”

“There had to be a way.”

“We’re coping,” I said.

“Are we?” he asked. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

“We came through every challenge he set in front of us so far.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re doing okay,” he responded.

I didn’t have a response to that.

He stood. “I’m going to go talk to some of the people in charge, find out where I can be useful.”

“Okay,” I told him.

He walked off, and I let my head rest against the ground.

Jack had a game plan here, and the more I thought about it, the more the ‘game’ seemed to be a farce. He knew we were helping. He was setting up situations where we had to help. When we’d started winning, maybe even winning faster than he’d anticipated, he’d ratcheted things up.

Just as it had at the outset, the situation now seemed to offer Theo the same dilemma as Jack had aimed to provide early on. To go after Jack or focus on bigger things.

It was measured, calculated, and it suggested that Jack was fully aware and fully in control of what was going on.

A cape knelt beside me. “Are you alright?”

We’d only gone through a small fraction of the Nine. Even assuming every group we had run into had been exterminated, there were so many left to deal with.

We came up with a solution to whatever crisis he posed, he responded by creating another, something offbeat enough that we had to change things up. Specialized groups of his pet monsters, two scenarios at once, and now we had new issues popping up before we’d finished with the last round.

The clones weren’t as fleshed out as the originals. A little more reckless. They were being set up to fail. Were they scary? Yes. Were they effective? Yes. But we were winning, and Jack wasn’t using them in a way that kept them alive. They were expendable assets.

It was all too possible that we could keep winning, if the game continued down this road. We’ll lose some, but we’ll come out ah-

I pushed myself to my feet. A cape put his hands on my shoulders, to try to get me to stay still.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I got the wind knocked out of me.”

“If you have an injury-”

“I’m pretty experienced when it comes to being injured. I’m fine. Really,” I said.

He didn’t move, but he did let his arms drop from my shoulders when I pushed them off me. I found my feet, straightened, and felt aches all across my back where I’d collided with the ground. I’d be one giant bruise tomorrow.

Then again, if we saw tomorrow, it would be a bonus.

The fighting against Nilbog’s creations was still ongoing. The flying gargoyle-thing had made it over the wall and was being swarmed by defending capes. Others were just now starting to climb over, and did their best to avoid the ranged fire that pelted them. Eight or nine more creatures flew over, only these ones carried smaller ‘goblins’. The winged ones were shot out of the sky, but many of the smaller creatures managed to survive the fall into trees and the midst of the heroes. The ones that did went on the offensive with zero hesitation.

“Need the Azazels!” someone shouted.

I directed the few bugs I had in the area to attack, assisting with bites, stings and silk cord.

I would help, but I wouldn’t join the battle. Not this one.

No, I’d used up every bug in my reach, and the damned goblin-things were too good at killing them. Nilbog had no doubt designed them to live off of a diet of insects, to supplement their diminishing supply of protein.

I made my way to the Dragonfly, my flight pack dangling from the damaged straps I’d looped around my shoulders.

I’d very nearly told myself that we were coming out ahead. Golem had been a dose of reality on that front. We weren’t coming out ahead. Jack was spreading fear, he was killing innocents, and he was whittling us down. Doing so with such expendable forces cost him nothing. Now, with Nilbog in his possession, he had access to that many more monsters and freaks that he could just throw away.

There was no guarantee we would continue down this road unfettered. Just the opposite. I fully expected Jack to turn to the rules he’d established at the very beginning and state how blatantly we were cheating. Then he’d carry out his threat, murder those one thousand people, and move on.

I reached the console, shrugged out of my flight pack and sat down.

I pressed a button, “Defiant. Not a priority, but get in touch when you can.”

It took a minute before I had all of the individual windows open. I set it so I could track the feeds provided by the various members of the Wards and Protectorate. Some were here, others were investigating the sites where more members of the Nine were taking action.

Redfield. The Undersiders and Brockton Bay Wards were holding a defensive position, their backs facing one another. Foil took a shot at a flesh toned blob that leaped between rooftops, then swiftly reloaded. Skinslip.

Skinslip was a minor regenerator with a changer ability, allowing him to manipulate his own skin. I could see him using it to scale a surface. He extended that ability by flaying people and crudely stitching or stapling their skin to his own. The regeneration connected the tissues and extended his power’s breadth and reach, but it didn’t prevent all rejection or decay, forcing him to replenish it from time to time. He was a newer member, but they’d still cloned him.

A quick check of the computer noted the members of the Nine they’d seen and fought. Three Skinslips. Three Hatchet Faces. Three Miasmas. Three Murder Rats.

Hatchet face excepted, they were enemies who were exceedingly mobile. Skinslip’s skin acted like a grappling hook, it let him climb, and it broke any fall. He could also smother and bludgeon his opponents with it, if he felt the need.

Miasma was a stranger, invisible and undetectable but for an odorless gas he gave off that wore away at other’s minds, causing headaches, ringing in the ears, watery eyes and eventual blindness, memory loss and coma.

Murder Rat, for her part, was agile.

It meant they were up against nine opponents that were fast or slippery enough that they couldn’t be caught. That group was supported by a trio of Hatchet Faces that could steadily lumber towards the group, keeping them moving, ensuring they couldn’t simply maintain a defensive position.

The camera images that Clockblocker and company wore shifted as they scrambled away. There was a shudder as a mass landed in their midst.

Hatchet Face, dropping down from a vantage point somewhere above them.

Rachel’s dogs went on the offensive, attacking him, but their flesh was already sloughing off, their connection to Rachel shut off, their bodies disintegrating.

Parian’s creations were already deflating.

More range than the Tyrant had possessed, and the power loss was immediate.

Foil shot her crossbow, but it did surprisingly little damage. Hatchet Face pulled the bolt from his shoulder with no difficulty.

“Behind us!”

The camera swiftly changed direction. A Murder Rat had landed opposite the Hatchet Face, sandwiching the group between the two villains. The camera panned, taking in the area, and I could see the silhouettes of other villains on nearby rooftops. More Murder Rats and Skinslips.

Hatchet Face threw the last dog aside. It collapsed in a slurry mess of loose skin and muscle. The dog fought its way free, shaking itself dry. Bastard was already free.

Clockblocker, Crucible and Toggle turned around, but Vista remained fixated on the animal.

The moment the group was distracted by the incoming titan, Murder Rat appeared. She drove her elbow into the side of Crucible’s throat, bringing one foot up to rake the side of his leg, but didn’t get any further.

Vista fired her gun straight into the villain’s back, then wheeled around and shot Hatchet Face in the chest.

Grue blanketed the area in darkness a moment later, the monitors going silent and dark.

I realized I’d been clenching my fists. I loosened them, then opened and closed them a few times to ease the strain.

Escalations, I thought.

The situation outside was worsening, but the Azazels had mobilized. They laid down the metal poles along the tops of the wall, opening fire with their lasers. That done, they joined the fight against the dragon-gargoyle thing that was continuing its suicidal attack against the defending capes. Chunks of it were being blasted and torn away, but it was doing a little damage to the defending capes.

The metal poles blossomed into the branching ‘gray blur’ nanotech barrier that would disintegrate on touch.

On the set of screens to my left, the Chicago Wards were joined by others as they ventured into what seemed to be a warzone. Civilians were fleeing in a panic, while the heroes advanced against the press of the crowd with a steady, wary caution.

The nature of the threat became clear. Rounding the corner, a single entity trudged forward. It was tiny, and it bore a large white cube on its back.

To look at it, I almost thought it was an Endbringer.

It wasn’t. It was only the second-scariest member of the Nine, xeroxed.

Eight Siberians.

One carried the cube, no doubt a container bearing the Mantons within. The other seven followed a pattern, lazy loops that brought them back to the cube every few minutes. They plunged through walls and into apartments and businesses, they returned with blood wicking off of their hands, feet and faces like water off a duck’s back.

I opened a communications channel.

“Weaver here. Don’t fight.”

“Wasn’t going to, but what the hell are we supposed to do?” Tecton asked.

Eight Siberians. Even without any other members of the Nine on the sidelines, it was an impossible fight.

“You need to run.”

“Run? The civilians-”

“Will have to run as well,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do. Accept it. You can’t slow her down, you can’t deny her what she wants.”

“We have to be able to do something,” he said.

“There are options,” I said, “But it’s not worth it.”

“What? Saving civilians is-”

“You’d die,” I said. “It would be a distraction, but you’d die. The civilians would die all the same.”

“What is it?”

“She’s still subject to gravity. Far as I know, she can’t fly. You drop her into a hole, she’ll climb out.”

“No point,” Grace said.

“No point,” I agreed. “Unless you get lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Drop the one that’s carrying the cube into a fissure or pit, if she falls far enough and the cube gets wedged in the crack, you’ll separate her from the cube. You’d have to destroy it before another Siberian makes contact with it, kill all of the Masters that are generating the Siberians.”

“It could work,” Wanton said.

“Unless she moves fast enough to avoid the fissure,” I said. “Which she can. Unless she’s digging her claws into the outside of the cube for a handhold, which she might be. Unless another Siberian returns before you manage to break into that cube, which is very possible, considering that cube looks like something a Mannequin made.”

“We have Grace, and we’ve got Cuff. We have Cadence and Enforce here, too.”

Enforce? Oh. N-Force.

“I don’t think it’ll be enough,” I said. “There’s too many maybes. You become a target of the Siberians the instant you try something, and you die if this doesn’t work out perfectly, which it won’t.”

“You want us to let civilians die.”

I stared at the screen. They were backing away swiftly now. A Siberian hopped onto the top of the cube, then looked directly at the group of heroes.

A moment later, she leaped off to one side.

Flaunting their invulnerability. Taunting.

“Walk away,” I said. “We’ll send others in. Others who can do something.”

“Who?”

I thought of how Rachel had changed tacks, ignoring the biggest target to go after the Murder Rat. It hadn’t been much, but it had caught the villain off guard, baited the Hatchet Face into an aggressive charge rather than a slower, more strategic advance.

“Switch it up. Go to Redfield. You guys specialize in containing and crushing the enemy. The Undersiders and Brockton Bay Wards can head to your location at the first opportunity.”

I didn’t wait for a response. My console was displaying an incoming message.

“Gotta go,” I said, closing the comms channel, hanging up on Tecton. I responded to the message.

“Defiant here.”

“Was just about to contact the Undersiders.”

“I heard. I’m already giving orders for them to back out. Sent a helicopter in to pick them up, hoping it gets to take off again.”

“Helicopter?”

“A.I. suits aren’t cooperating. I’d send one against Hatchet if they were-“

“Defiant?“

“One suit just took off. Reinforcing the Undersiders.”

I could sense the fighting outside. My bugs were doing precious little against Nilbog’s rioting army. The capes were whittling them down, killing them in droves, but it was time and effort taken away from containing the Nine. Which was exactly what Jack wanted.

In the same instant Defiant had talked about the suit taking off, one of the Azazels had gone still.

Something was seriously wrong.

“What do you need, Weaver? I have things to handle.”

“Two years ago, I was told we couldn’t go after the Nine, because we can’t decode the portal without knowing the exit point. They just used one.”

“It’s in Ellisburg.”

“It’s our fastest route to Jack. How long does it take to tap into the portal?”

“Depends on the means we use. It doesn’t matter. The portal isn’t accessible.”

“We’re losing, Defiant. We’re winning the fights but we’re losing in the long run. We need to act decisively. End this.”

“You want to use the portal entrance, knowing where it is?”

“Yes. We just… we need capes that we can count on, on a lot of levels. And I need your help. Can you arrange for a sturdier ship? The Dragonfly won’t cut it.”

“Yes,” he said. “That can be arranged. I’ll have to pilot it myself.”

“If this doesn’t work out, if we get overwhelmed, then that’s it. We can’t afford the losses at this juncture. I get that. But we can’t afford to not take this opportunity.”

Another pause. Was he typing something?

“What’s the status?”

“We’re losing containment in Ellisburg. Siberians are racking up casualties, and Redfield isn’t doing great either. Your Undersiders will be evacuating if they can make it another two blocks to the helicopter without getting intercepted… I’m not sure what they can do against eight Siberians.”

“More than the Chicago Wards can. But that’s not enough on it’s own. We need to call in the big guns. We know Jack’s nowhere nearby. It’s a safe time to put them into play.”

“We have people on call, but we’re holding them back,” Defiant replied. “Jack will hold his strongest cards in reserve for last. Chevalier advised that we catch him off guard.”

“There’s no point anymore. Stop holding back. Jack’s escalating when we do. We established a tempo, he’s matching us. Let’s go all-in. We’ll get him to play every card he has on hand, and maybe in the process, we’ll see him make a mistake.”

“He’s not one to make mistakes.”

“We lose nothing, and we gain time,” I said. “Which big guns do we have?”

“The Thanda. Cauldron has volunteered the services of their two elite members. The Las Vegas Capes offered help, as did the Ambassadors. The Alcott girl has her ability to foresee the future, but she’s trying to reduce the strain she experiences so she can offer more assistance at the most critical juncture.”

“The fight with Jack.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. That… probably makes sense. Listen, I’ll handle what I can from here, take some of the load off your hands. I’ll see if I can’t get recruits from among the capes I trust to handle their own.”

“Do. And I would appreciate it if you would consider me one of them. I’ll be there with the Pendragon in twenty minutes, I just need to pick up the technology for hacking the portal.”

“Bring me some bugs when you come.”

“Yes.”

That said, he hung up. No pleasantries.

It was a relief. Down to business.

■

Fifteen minutes to go.

I waited impatiently for the capes in question to gather. We needed good capes, powerful capes. Too many were occupied elsewhere.

A whole contingent had deployed to Hyde Park. None of my teams. Dragon’s Teeth, the New York teams, the Texas teams.

I picked Jouster’s point of view. I knew him, and it would afford me the most opportunities to see other capes and figure out their identities.

Population of three thousand five hundred, and the place was empty. No victims, no members of the Nine. No blood, no violence, no signs of any disruption.

But the first wave of capes had been whittled down, going silent on the radio before disappearing entirely.

Now, as the teams moved through the city, there was nothing on the video, which ruled out Nice Guy. That left only a few options.

“Stranger protocols in effect,” the captain of the Dragon’s Teeth reported. “We’re going full dark. Eyes on the lightning.“

“Eyes on the lightning,” I responded. For the moment, I was filling in for Dragon’s absence and Defiant’s preoccupation. I knew about the Dragon’s teeth, had studied their operations book. I wasn’t an armchair general, but I’d have to settle for being one here..

They were using those full-face helmets to block off all sight, to shut out all sound. Their uniforms offered full coverage. The only things they would rely on were video cameras on their helmets and the battle computers that were wired into their helmets.

It wasn’t enough, apparently, to see anyone or anything. Things seemed eerily quiet.

Jouster jumped as one cape cried out. The man’s back arched, first one way, then the other.

Still, they obeyed the instructions. Jouster was among the ones who turned to search the surroundings. The point of his lance was visible in the corner of the screen, as he held it ready.

Nothing.

The man screamed louder.

He twisted, his ribs distending, his mouth yawning open.

It’s an illusion, I thought.

Kind of. Sort of.

Not really.

It was really nice to think of it as a really convincing illusion. That was a reassuring way of handling it.

Because the alternative was that Psychosoma was doing the sort of thing Labyrinth did, pulling otherworldly things into our reality to replace objects and people.

When killed, they’d revert back to how they’d been before.

The man continued to twist and distort until he wasn’t recognizable anymore.

The thing whirled around, reaching back with one claw, preparing to strike at a comrade.

A cape incinerated him before he could get any further.

The illusion was dispelled. The wrong illusion. Purple smoke flowed out from around the corpse of the young hero.

“Nyx!” someone spat the word.

Jouster swiftly backed away. Every cape in the group was wearing a gas mask, but that was not an absolute guarantee.

Two more people in the group began changing.

A mix of Psychosomas and Nyxes. Who else?

“She’s covering the area with her smoke,” I spoke, over the channel. “You need to clear it.”

“On it. Cover your eyes!” Jouster hollered.

Jouster raised his lance, then struck out at a light pole. Lightning flared out, impossibly bright, and the camera briefly went on the fritz.

Somewhere in the midst of that, reality became clear. Bloodstains everywhere. Corpses were draped over every surface where the investigating capes weren’t likely to step – on car hoods and roofs, on light poles and in trees.

And in the midst of the crowd, there were the enemies, simply standing and observing. Nyxes, Psychosomas and Night Hags. The Nyx were women with pale red skin and black eyes, fog bleeding out of the vents at their arms and backs. The Psychosomas were men, tall, bald and narrow, with pencil-thin mustaches and beards, spidery fingers and clothing that hung off them like it had been draped on. The Night hags, by contrast, were women, dark haired, dressed in black, with skin as white as chalk. Their dresses seemed to bleed into the surrounding landscape, so that everything within fifteen feet of them was covered in that crumpled-looking black cloth.

The Nyx clones and Psychosomas ran for cover. The Night Hags were the cover. D.T. soldiers and Wards opened fire. Hoyden struck a car with literal explosive force, and sent it flying. Ninety percent of the offense was directed at the Night Hags.

The women practically disintegrated as the bullets, flames and other projectiles made contact. Their bodies shattered into thousands of black shards.

Moments later, they emerged from the landscape. One park bench distorted and reconfigured into a new Night Hag. That Night Hag was summarily slain, and reformed herself out of a nearby patch of grass.

Location possession, in a way, but it was shallow. She was most effective with materials that stood above the ground’s surface.

In the midst of dealing with the approaching Hags, the D.T. officers and heroes were left to handle the victims who had appeared to be transforming. When the smoke had burned away, one had been revealed to be fine, crouching with his hands over his head, the other was still afflicted. They shot the victim and broke the effect.

More smoke was flowing in with surprising speed and quantity, erasing the images of blood and bodies. The Night Hags were turning translucent, nearly invisible-

And they were gone.

Jouster moved to strike the light-post again, only for black hands to grab him and pull him into darkness and illusory fog.

The image on my screen distorted, then went utterly black.

There was a sound, like a slow, wet grinding sound. Chewing, as if from a dozen mouths at once.

I changed camera perspectives.

“-break up the fog!” someone shouted. Two more of their allies were starting to change.

Someone threw a flashbang. It didn’t disrupt the smoke.

“What do we do!?” one of the capes shouted. He was almost more frantic than the Dragon’s Tooth soldiers around him.

The sound of a gun being cocked turned heads.

The camera turned as well.

It was Contessa, accompanied by the Number Man. Both held guns.

She shot one of the afflicted, then walked past the other, ignoring him. She opened fire in the fog. One clip, each shot aimed and measured, fired with a peculiar rhythm. One, then two in rapid succession, one, then two in rapid succession. She reloaded with an almost casual ease, then slid the gun into its holster.

The Number Man had her back. He fired into the darkness three times.

It took two minutes for the smoke to clear.

Two Nyx dead. Three Psychosomas. Four Night Hags.

The doorway was already opening for the pair to make their exit.

“Dude, who the hell are they?”

“The bogeymen,” Hoyden said.

“Shit,” someone said. One of the capes.

“They’re on our side?” Another asked.

“Apparently.”

“Then why don’t they go after Jack?” a cape asked.

Because she fits in the same category as Eidolon, I thought. Too dangerous to allow her to make contact with the man.

I wasn’t even that comfortable with them helping here, but there weren’t a lot of excellent options for thinker capes who could simply cut right through the layers of deceptions the enemy had been using.

I noted the capes who were present and still in fighting shape. I’d hoped for Jouster. No such luck.

I dialed Hoyden’s phone, watched her pick up on the video.

“Need a hand with something,” I said. “I’m going to send a ship your way.”

■

Ten minutes to go.

The Undersiders stood far enough away from the Siberian cube that the camera couldn’t even make out the one who carried the thing.

“He finds the Siberians boring, I imagine,” Tattletale commented, over the channel. “Before, they were an enigma. Now they’re just… the same thing, over and over. Tearing people apart.”

“Just tell me this isn’t going to be the moment of idiocy that ends the world,” I said.

“No way,” Tattletale said. “I promise.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“Ninety… three percent certain.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“Geez. You’ve lost your sense of humor these past few years. I’m kidding. I’m sure.”

“You’ve been wrong.”

“I’m right. I swear. Now stop fretting! Wait…“

The Siberians left, engaging in another brief spree, attacking civilians.

“Let’s not wait too long,” I said. I felt a sick feeling in my gut. Had I been right to send away the Chicago Wards? Seven or so people were dying every one or two minutes.

“Wait…”

The last group of Siberians abandoned the cube, leaving the carrier holding it.

“Wait…”

One more returned after a very brief trip, cast a glance around, and then fled.

“Now.”

Clockblocker fired his threads from his gauntlet. They surrounded the cube-carrier, and he froze them.

Unstoppable force against an immovable object.

Which won?

The Siberian made contact with the thread and flickered out of existence, and the thread went limp. The cube fell with a crash.

Others began to return. Vista was distorting the cube, creating gaps, weak points.

“Thanda,” Tattletale said.

Clockblocker activated the device on his back. A dome unfolded around him, almost like a tent, though more rigid.

Rachel had already fled with her dogs. Even so, it was tight, everyone pressed together inside.

He froze the dome.

I regretted that I didn’t get to see the follow-up attack.

The Thanda had a cape that was sort of in the same vein as Shuffle. A teleporter of landmasses.

This cape didn’t need to teleport things onto solid ground. In fact, he specialized in the opposite.

A large building was teleported into the stratosphere, where it summarily fell on the cube. I could hear the crash through the cameras the Brockton Bay Wards wore.

Siberians down, I thought.

One more group to handle.

“Rachel’s on her way to me,” I said. Grue was out – I didn’t trust him in a face to face confrontation against the Nine, and he hadn’t volunteered. Imp was out as well. Too risky, too much of a coin toss, whether her power would be seen through. “Foil? You know what we’re doing.”

“On my way.”

“I’m coming too,” Parian said.

“I’ll be on the comms,” Tattletale responded.

■

Tecton slammed his gauntlets into the ground. Murder Rats were knocked down from the walls. The streets had been shattered, and the dismantled craft lay in the streets, with one dead Miasma nearby.

Another slam, combined with an activation of both piledrivers, and he created a fissure, breaking up the ground beneath the two remaining Hatchet Faces.

They made steady progress anyways. They were too strong, their stride too long. Tattletale had been right. Running was difficult at best.

Cuff used her metallokinesis to heave a small disc of metal. Effective enhanced strength, along with the ability to control the rotation of the projectile, the ability to control the flight of it after it left her hand…

It slammed into a Hatchet Face’s collarbone, burying into his flesh.

He broke into a run, axe held aloft.

She prepared to throw another disc, only for a Murder Rat to leap onto her from above.

The metal blades of Murder Rat’s claws were swept aside as if Cuff had parried it with something physical. Cuff settled for striking Murder Rat across the eyes with the razor edge of the discus.

Grace followed up with a crushing kick from a steel-toed boot. A Murder Rat pounced on her, then vaulted off with enough force that Grace’s head struck the ground. Grace didn’t get up.

Skinslips moved to flank, simultaneously reaching out with cloaks made of skin and shielding their real bodies with the amorphous limbs of stolen flesh.

Romp’s animated constructions stumped forward, providing just as much raw mass to defend against the reaching attacks. They picked up speed as they moved, charging like bulls, catching the Skinslips well off guard.

The fight was well in hand. Murder Rats leaped up onto building faces so they might be able to leap down and strike a vulnerable target, but Tecton made the entire neighborhood shake. The Murder Rats were trapped where they were, clinging to the surfaces, unable to attack.

One caught a discus with her claws, then let it fall to the ground.

No. There was one more threat. Tecton’s helmet caught it on camera as it loomed on a nearby building. A Mannequin.

Then, casually, it grabbed the most unhurt Hatchet Face with both hands and whipped its upper body a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around to fling him into the mass of defending heroes.

Tecton punched, his piledriver extending, but it did surprisingly little damage.

And with the Hatchet Face so close, the Chicago Wards were left powerless. Only tinker devices worked.

The Mannequin charged.

Being a tinker, the Mannequin didn’t suffer at all in the midst of Hatchet Face’s power.

“Direct your attacks on the Hatchet Face, now!” I ordered.

A piledriver-gauntlet hit him, followed by another. Cuff used a discus to slash at his throat, but it barely cut.

He was still alive – his power wasn’t canceled out.

The Mannequin let blades extend from his wrists and elbows. Not long, sleek, elegant blades like the original Mannequin had used, but heavy, crude ones, like axe heads. Cuff screamed as he brought one down onto her armored shoulder. She folded over in an awkward way as she collapsed to the ground.

He spun around, almost skipped to one side to avoid Tecton, then directed attacks at Romp.

She took shelter behind her no-longer-animated creation, and the Mannequin-thing turned away, directing his attention at Tecton, who was trying to bash the Hatchet Face’s head in. It was a narrow window of opportunity, here. The other, injured Hatchet Face was approaching. If he didn’t manage it in five or so seconds, there would be two to contend with.

A heavy bullet caught the Mannequin in the back of the head. Ice cascaded out the back in a giant spike.

Tecton used the opportunity to slam the upper ridge of his gauntlet into the Hatchet Face’s mouth and extend the piledriver full-force.

That did it.

More bullets pummeled the Mannequin. One resulting chunk of ice partially encased Tecton, only to shatter when he pulled back.

Further shots followed, but they veered in awkward directions, sinking to hit the ground too early.

He has another power. One that was being canceled by Hatchet Face.

Winter’s Power, I realized.

But Grace had powers now too. She grabbed Hatchet Face’s weapon and swung it, was nearly trapped in the ice that exploded out from the wound.

Romp’s creation charged the ceramic man, and Tecton raised a shelf of ground around him to limit his movements.

He was being abused, battered.

Tecton’s head turned, and I could see Chevalier on the camera. Revel was beside him.

Chevalier fired his cannonblade again. One shot to polish off the remaining Hatchet Face that was closing the distance, and another directed at the Winter-Mannequin. The Winter-Mannequin’s power took the impetus out of the second shot.

The Wards were moving slower now too. Reacting slower. Tecton barely resisted as the Mannequin seized him in one hand.

Didn’t even get up after the Mannequin virtually punched him into the ground.

Blades extended from his palms, the Mannequin spun like a top.

Chevalier charged, and the Mannequin changed tacks immediately, using a chain to draw himself up to a rooftop, where he clumsily climbed over the edge.

Ranged attacks didn’t work, and he was deceptively dangerous in short range.

Revel launched energy-orbs, but they barely seemed to touch the Winter-Mannequin hybrid.

Then Wanton closed the distance.

Ice chipped away, and the resulting chunks flaked away at the other pieces of ice. It was soon a localized blizzard, and the large hunks of ice that clung to the Mannequin’s suit began to break away.

More ice appeared, but it, in turn, was broken by the yet-larger chunks that had been picked up.

The storm began to slow as the Winter-Mannequin concentrated his power on a smaller area. The storm came to a standstill.

Chevalier raised his cannonblade to fire, only to stumble, dropping his weapon.

Miasma.

“Indiscriminate attack, Chevalier!” I said. “Revel, get down!”

Chevalier swung, very nearly striking Revel as she dropped flat to the ground. He connected with something, and Miasma appeared in an explosion of thick green smoke.

The villain rolled, then disappeared again.

But Revel was following up, spitting orbs of energy out of her lantern. Miasma wasn’t fast enough to dodge all of them. He, and another Miasma behind him were burned, holes the size of softballs punched through their torsos.

Cuff was helping Tecton stand, using her metallokinesis to push at his armor. Once he was standing, they worked together to outfit Tecton with one of the specialized shots we’d prepared.

The Mannequin wasn’t going to go down to fast moving projectiles or short-range attacks.

They’d take him down the same way I’d fought him ages ago.

Tecton used his piledrivers as a sort of gun, launching two cup-shaped hunks of metal with material strung between them.

The net unfolded in the air, and it draped over the Mannequin. Spider Silk and metal wire interwoven. It caught on the ice and the extended blades, and snagged on fingers and chains.

The Mannequin was still struggling to escape when Chevalier slowly closed the gap, bringing his sword down like a great guillotine. He had one hand pressed to the side of his helmet. Blood streaked down his arm.

Last group, for now. I watched as they checked on the injured. Chevalier’s eye had been stabbed, but not perforated, and Grace had suffered a heavy blow to the head. Cuff’s shoulder socket had been broken by the Mannequin.

I almost hated to ask.

“Tecton,” I said. “We’ve got a game plan. Maybe a way to get Jack. You up for helping?”

“My team isn’t in good shape.”

“If you want to stay, keep doing this-”

“No,” he said. “No. Just… maybe my team should sit the rest of this out.”

“You’ve all done good work,” Chevalier said. “Above and beyond the call of duty. You don’t even have to ask.”

“I’ll come on this mission, if you have a use for me,” Tecton said.

“I do.”

“I’ll come as well,” Chevalier said.

“You’re injured.”

A pause, as if waiting for me to realize what I was saying. This was the guy that had gone up against Behemoth face to face, scarcely an hour after suffering critical injuries in an assassination attempt.

“I’ll come,” he said, again.

“Glad to have you,” I said.

■

It was suicidal. Returning to Nilbog’s kingdom, where his creations had riled themselves up, hungry for blood. I could only hope that their forces would be thinner towards the center, with the sustained attack on the surrounding capes.

Two Dragon’s Teeth to round out the group, so we had people trained in the use of containment foam and other PRT munitions. Veteran PRT soldiers outfitted with the best gear the Guild could provide.

And Defiant up at the cockpit, rounding out our group.

I felt my pulse quicken. My hand traced over the box that Defiant had brought, with all the bugs I needed.

Nilbog’s army seemed endless. We’d only seen a fraction of it. It flowed over, under and through the walls, in numbers that tied up the defending capes. Our battle lines couldn’t hold a position for long before something threw them off. Someone vital would get injured, or a creature would burrow out from beneath the ground. Something would fly over to land in the middle of the back line, forcing a reorganization.

We weren’t being overwhelmed. Any cape was stronger than the typical starved, desperate, reckless monster. But this was definitely not helping.

A man’s voice came over the comms. “Three new locations with attacks. Coordinated strikes. Harbingers sighted. They are reinforced by Nilbog’s creations.“

Bonesaw got something set up already, I thought.

Defiant was clenching his fist.

Who was the man?

“Doesn’t matter,” Defiant said. “Our focus is here.”

“Fuckin’ right,” Hoyden said. She turned to smile at Rachel. “Right?”

Rachel only frowned, turning her attention to the dogs that sat between and on either side of her legs.

Hoyden punched Rachel in one arm, then grinned. “Right?”

“Right.”

“Right!” Hoyden grinned.

Heavy metal boots banged against the ramp as our last attendee made his way into the back of the craft.

It started at the center of town, a rolling plume of fire, sparks and smoke that seemed to almost lurch skyward, in fits and starts. Each set of charges that went off pushed the flame up through the smoke of the ones that had come before.

Then the charges around the perimeter of the city went off, each focused inward. The rolling mass of fire and superheated air at the center of the city shot through the cloud cover, and the entire sky turned colors. Reds, oranges and yellows, interlaced with the gray and near-black shadows of the smoke.

Killington was officially gone, the buildings leveled, the bodies and bloodstains scoured from the earth. Families wouldn’t get to put their loved ones to rest the way they wanted, but that was on the Nine, not on us. There was no safe way to recover the bodies, to ensure that there weren’t any traps or time delayed tricks in each and every one of the corpses. It also meant Breed’s minions were torched before they reached an adult stage.

The area would be marked off for a duration after this, in case there were any heat-resistant bacteria or the like. Cheap, prefabricated walls would seal in the area, and roads would be put in to allow people to make detours.

Quarantine, I thought. Every step of the way, we had to be on guard.

It was time to move on. I looked to the book in my lap, turned down the corner of the page to mark it, and then stood, stretching. It was a nice spot, a long porch just outside a cabin, one that was probably rented out at a premium price during the skiing months. Far enough away to be safe, high enough to serve as a vantage point while letting me reach to the necessary areas with my bugs.

The entire porch was layered with pieces of paper, organized into rows and columns with some overlap. The edge of each paper was weighed down by a mass of bugs, almost insufficient as the hot air from the quarantine measure blew past us. Millipedes that had been moving across the various pages remained still, striving only to stay in place.

The moment the wind died down, I bid the bugs to shift position, carrying the pages to me, sorting them into the appropriate order.

I bent down and began collecting the pieces of paper. I could feel the raised bumps on the pages as I brushed them free of specks of dirt and leaves. Each set of bumps corresponded with a letter or punctuation mark, which had been printed over the dots in thick, bold, letters.

I gathered the pages into file folders, then clipped them shut, stacking them on the patio chair. I made my way to the patio table, bending down to collect the pages as they made their way to me. The writing on these was different; the letters were drawn in thick, bold strokes, fat, almost as if I’d drawn them in marker. My notes: thoughts, things that needed clarification, ideas.

At the patio table, I took hold of a beetle and used its pincers to pick some petals out of the shallow bowl, grabbed the caterpillar I’d been using as a brush, then tossed the two bugs over the porch’s railing. I tipped the ink from the bowl back into a small jar, then screwed it tight, sliding it into a pocket at the small of my back.

I was still getting organized when Defiant appeared, ascending the stairs on the far end of the porch.

“Quite a view,” he commented.

I looked at the resort town. The fire hadn’t yet gone out. It was flattening out, scouring everything from the area.

Almost everything. One or two things would remain. Probably until well after the sun went out.

“Pyrotechnical’s stuff?” I asked, distracting myself.

“And some of Dragon’s. Are you ready to go?”

“I’m ready,” I said. I picked up the files, then passed them around behind me, where the arms of my flight pack pinned them in place. I was left with only the book to hold.

He walked beside me as we made our way down to where the craft had landed. His suit had been augmented and altered, and he now stood a foot and a half taller than he had when I’d first met him. Broad ‘toes’ on either side of his boots helped stabilize him, while his gloves ended in clawed gauntlets that extended a little beyond where his hands should be. His spear was longer, and both ends of the weapon were heavy with the devices he’d loaded into it.

On his forearms, shoulders and knees there were panels that were like narrow shields, each three or four feet long, each marked with designs like a dragon’s wings, or with a dragon’s face engraved on the front, mouth open, with red lights glowing from within. Wings on his back served less to let him fly and more to accentuate his movements, a more complex, bulkier system than I had with my flight pack. Then again, I was only a hundred and thirty pounds at five feet, ten inches in height, and Defiant must have weighed six hundred pounds, with all that armor.

I’d seen him fight Endbringers in that suit, seen how he could move as fast as anyone who wasn’t a speedster, turning his spinning weapon and those shield-like extensions on his armor into a whirling flurry of nano-thorns, cutting through seventy to eighty percent of the Endbringer’s flesh before they reached material too dense to penetrate.

Which was when he’d use his other weapons.

I envied him a little, that he could take the fight to the enemy like that. We were similar, on a lot of levels, but we differed on that front. On a good day or otherwise, I’d never be able to truly fight an Endbringer. I had to depend on others. The best I could do was coordinate.

“The moment you or one of your teams lets something slip, this falls apart.”

“I won’t fuck up.”

“You will. Or someone working under you will. You’re good, but we can’t account for every contingency. Something’s going to go wrong at some point. The later that occurs, the better.”

“Yeah,” I responded.

“Every minute that passes is a minute where we can gather information, close in on Jack and figure things out. We’ve got a lot of good minds and good eyes working on this, but there are a lot of bases to cover. We let Golem get close, mop up everything we can and contain everything else, and then we take Jack down.”

I nodded. “But we don’t want to stand back and wait when people could be hurt, or when every second that passes is a second that Jack could be making contact with that critical person. Causing a certain trigger event, saying the wrong thing to the wrong individual…”

“There’s a balance. I trust you’ll find it.”

“I hope I can,” I said.

We’d interacted less and less in recent months, and those interactions had been short and to the point by necessity. It didn’t hurt that the two of us weren’t terribly social people. We didn’t revel in small talk. We could be adroit when circumstances forced our hands, but we could also stumble, say things in a way that was just a little off, or give the wrong impression.

I liked that we had a professional relationship, that we didn’t have other stuff getting in the way. No pleases and thank yous. We both knew what was at stake, we were on the same page, and we were doing what we felt we had to in order to get the necessary shit done.

“I spoke with Alcott,” he said.

I drew in a breath, then sighed. “What does she say?”

“The numbers haven’t changed dramatically. The window’s closed, but not considerably, which suggests a lot of things.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Ninety-three point eight percent chance the world ends,” Defiant said.

Up from Eighty three point four percent. That’s not considerable?

“She’s done us the favor of plotting the changes in the numbers over time. When things stabilized for a considerable length of time, she scaled down from noting the numbers twice a day to noting them once. Eighty-three point four percent, as of the beginning of the crisis in Brockton Bay, the Nine’s attempt to test and recruit new members.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Eighty-eight point six percent after they escaped the city. It was quite possibly our best opportunity at killing Jack, and we missed it.”

I frowned.

“With each destination the Nine reached after Brockton Bay, the numbers shifted, and not for the better. Half a percent here, two percent there.”

“Chances where someone could have theoretically killed him but didn’t.”

Defiant nodded. “We ran things by the thinkers, and that’s the general consensus. Low chances, but he had the Siberian with him up until the fight in Boston.”

The same fight where Dragon and Defiant had taken on the Nine, and the Siberian had been killed.

“We had one opportunity there. That failure is on me.”

He turned his head slightly, then amended his statement. “On us.”

I didn’t disagree. Denying that would mean denying my own responsibility in failing to kill Jack in Brockton Bay.

“Ninety-three point eight,” Defiant repeated, for emphasis.

“Six point two percent chance we’ll pull this off,” I said.

“It remains tied to him. If we kill him in the next ninety hours, the chances vastly, vastly improve. Depending on how we kill him, it could mean reducing things to a mere twenty-two percent chance or a one percent chance.”

I nodded, making a mental note. “Theoretically, if we nuked the northeast corner of America…”

“Only a sixty percent chance of working, with some decimal points that Dragon’s urging me to include as I speak, and a high chance we set things in motion anyways. Twenty eight or so.”

He asked Dinah, I thought to myself. The same question I had in mind, give or take.

There were clues there. “A nuke won’t kill him for sure. Bomb shelter?”

“Possible. Or he’s keeping Siberian close at hand.”

“And whatever role he plays… he greases the wheels, he doesn’t guarantee it. You’re saying there’s a chance things get set off even if he dies. If that doesn’t happen, then there’s some point in the future, roughly fourteen years from now, where things get set off anyways.”

Defiant nodded.

“Every time I think about it, I can’t help but think it’s a trigger event,” I said. “Someone getting a power that finally breaks something essential, or a power without the limits that keep other powers in check. But I don’t want to think along those lines if it keeps me from seeing the obvious.”

“Sensible. But let’s not dwell on it. The thinkers are handling it, as best as they can, and we have to devote attention to this crisis. We’ve got all of the big guns lined up. The moment things fall apart and Jack decides the rules of his game, Dragon is going to try and jam communications, and each of us moves in for a quick decisive victory over the members of the Nine on site.”

I nodded.

We were just arriving at the perimeter of Killington. I could see some of the big guns Defiant had been talking about.

Two Azazels had set up thick hedges of that blurry gray material just behind the barriers the heroes had erected to protect themselves and contain the fire. I also saw the Dragon’s Teeth.

Soldiers was the wrong word, but it was close.

Each wore armor in gun-metal and black, with parallels to the standard PRT uniforms I was more familiar with. Their helmets, however, had three eyeholes, with blue lenses glowing faintly from beneath. Two lenses for their eyes, a third for a camera. The armor was bulky, offering thick protection around the neck and joints, with a heavy pack on the back for both oxygen and for the computers they wore.

They were, in large part, wearing stripped-down versions of Defiant’s outfit. Sacrifices had been made to account for the fact that their suits didn’t render them seven and a half feet tall. Each carried a sword and a laser pistol.

I’d never liked the cameras. Heads turned as I approached, and I knew they were recording, tracking details about me and feeding them back to a main server, where they compiled information, discarded excess.

The combat engines that the Dragon’s Teeth were wearing were still in early stages, the data patchy, depending on the target. The people in uniform had spent weeks and months training with the things, learning to shift fluidly between their own tactics and awareness of the situation and the data that was provided. Protectorate Capes and Wards that were just starting out were being trained with the things, but those of us that had experience fighting tended to find them a distraction.

Useful? Yes. A bit of a boost, a bit of an edge. But not quite at the point where everyone could benefit.

Not yet.

Not that there was much room for developing any of it if the end of the world went ahead on schedule.

I could see Narwhal, standing off to one side, two of the Dragon’s Teeth flanking her. Masamune wasn’t present, but from what I knew of the guy, he wasn’t even close to being a front-lines combatant. They’d recruited him from the ruined area of Japan, a somewhat crazed hermit, and gave him work in figuring out how to mass produce their stuff without the maintenance issues snowballing out of control, like tinker tech tended to do in large quantities.

Thanks to him, they had the Dragon’s Teeth, they had the combat engines and they had top of the line gear for various members of the Protectorate and Wards.

Of the other members of the Guild, the only other one who could theoretically be on the front lines of the fight would be Glyph. I could only assume she was somewhere close.

The Thanda weren’t here. If Dragon had managed to get in touch with others, they hadn’t yet arrived. I could only guess as to what Cauldron might be doing. Faultline’s crew, the Irregulars…

Too many maybes. With Endbringers attacking every two months, a lot of people were busy reeling from recent attacks or preparing for the next.

I looked at the assembled capes. The Undersiders, two Wards teams, the Protectorate, the Guild. Clockblocker, Vista and Kid Win were in the other Wards team. A little older. Clockblocker had expanded his costume, adding some light power armor that seemed primarily focused on holding a heavy construction at his back. Vista, for her part, was a little taller, her hair longer, tied in a french braid that was clipped just in front of one shoulder. She was packing a heavier gun. Probably something Kid Win had made.

And Kid Win was hardly a kid anymore. I hesitated to call him a teenager, even. His rig looked like it packed more artillery than any of Dragon’s craft. No neck, no arms, he barely looked capable of walking. Just two stumpy legs, a simple gold helmet with a red pane covering his face and enough gun nozzles that he looked like a hedgehog.

“This is probably the last time we’ll all be standing here together before this ends,” Chevalier said. “I won’t do a big speech.”

He turned his head to take us all in. “I’ve done too many of them over the past two years, I’d only repeat myself. Everyone here knows what we’re here for, why we’re doing this. We’ve talked this over with each of you in turn and you don’t need convincing, you don’t need a reminder of what’s at stake. You already know the role you’re going to play in this. Words aren’t going to change any of that. Good luck, be proud, and maybe say a little prayer to God, or ask for a little help from whoever or whatever you believe in.”

The instant he finished, the Azazels and other Dragon-craft began opening up, doors sliding apart and ramps lowering.

“The one time I do show up for one of these things, and no speech. I feel gypped.”

I didn’t see who had muttered the comment, but I could guess it was Imp.

“No dying,” I said, as everyone started moving.

“No dying,” others echoed me. The voices of the Undersiders and the Chicago Wards were loudest among them.

My teams gathered in the Dragonfly, while the Chicago Protectorate and Brockton Bay Wards made their way to Defiant’s larger ship, along with a contingent of the Dragon’s Teeth.

Golem stood apart, until my ship was nearly at full capacity.

“It all comes down to this,” he said, as I joined him at the base of the ramp, “All the training, all the planning and preparation, studying about the Nine backwards and forwards…”

“Yeah,” I responded, as I stepped up to stand beside him. Our teams were getting sorted out, finding benches and seats. I reached behind my back to get the file folders I’d brought with me.

“I’m sorry if I was harsh yesterday.”

I shook my head and reached out to put my hand on his shoulder. It was support, and maybe a bit of a push. He made his way up the ramp.

Stepping inside just behind Golem, I used the same controls that managed my flight pack to indicate that the ship could close the door.

The Chicago Wards had seated themselves on one side of the ship, the Undersiders on the other. Something of a mistake, that, because it meant they sat facing one another as we made our way to our destination.

A little awkward. I sat with them behind me as I took the cockpit. The thing flew itself, but it freed me to focus on other things.

Chevalier had talked about making peace with the powers that be. I frowned, staring at the control panel as the ship lifted off.

Passenger, I thought. Been a while, trying to figure out how to make peace with the fact that you’re there, that you’re affecting me somehow, taking control whenever I’m not in my own mind. I think we’ve made strides. I’ve sort of accepted that you’re going to do what you’re going to do, whether that helps me or hurts me.

So maybe, just maybe, you could help me out today. Whatever it is you do, whatever motivates you, I can continue to play along, but I need a bit of backup here.

My eyes fell on the bugs that crawled on the back of my hand. Not even a whisper of a movement.

Yeah, didn’t think I’d get a reply. Guess we’ll see.

The ship’s acceleration kicked in, and the bugs took flight.

■

My eyes scanned the screens in front of me. I had camera feeds from Clockblocker and Revel, from Chevalier, Imp, and the airborne Azazel. They all focused on a single area, each from a different direction.

A thick white mist lingered throughout an area. It was early in the morning, and that might have played a role, but there were no people. Even for a smaller city like Schenectady, that wasn’t so usual. At nearly eight in the morning, there should have been people leaving for work, people running errands.

Desolate. White fog.

“Winter’s here,” I said, speaking over the comms. “Others to be confirmed. We’ve talked about this one, Golem.”

I turned the computer off and strode out of the ship. Rachel was waiting for me outside, standing guard with her dogs and her wolf.

“Winter means Crimson too, doesn’t it?” Golem asked.

“Probably. Probably means-“

“We see you,” The words were like a whisper, barely audible. “See you standing there. Oh, I do hope you’re not Theodore. Tell me you aren’t, because it means we get to play all we want.”

“Screamer,” I informed the others. Early Nine member, psychological warfare, pressure, distraction. Sound manipulation. Her power meant her voice didn’t get quieter as it traveled great distances. That wasn’t the full extent of-

“Nice weapon,” Her voice sounded in my ear, at a normal speaking volume. I didn’t flinch. I could sense my surroundings with my bugs, and I could hear things with them, hear how the sound panned out in a weird way over the entire area.

It was a sinuous sound, seductive in how convincing it was. Every time she spoke, she sounded a little more like me. It would be the same for the others, hearing themselves.

She was somewhere in the area. The question was how she’d gotten a sense of our voices so quickly. There was supposed to be a limit to how quickly she could pick up on that stuff just from overhearing us.

“Confirm, team leader,” Golem said, over the channel. “And can we use the password system we talked about?“

“Queen. Password system is a go. What do you need confirmation on?”

“Ring.Enemy headcount.“

“Stag. No headcount given, I think that’s Screamer fucking with you. Others include Winter, probably Crimson, and probably Cherish, if she’s finding us like she is. All allied capes, be advised, we’re putting passwords into effect. Stay calm, don’t panic.”

“I do like it when they make it challenging,” Screamer’s whisper hissed in my ear. It had changed in tone, pitch, cadence.

The Dragonfly took off as I made my way closer to the site. Outside of the area, there were people reacting. Some fled, others were taking cover, followed by disparate voices.

“Haymaker. I’m engaging,” Golem said. “Recommendation?“

Screamer interrupted, “Getting advice is against the spirit of this challenge, isn’t it, Theodore? You are Theodore, aren’t you? I think you should confirm for us.”

“Mantis,” I said, voicing the password, “Don’t respond to her. It’s what she wants. Take out Cherish ASAP, if she’s here, Screamer after that.”

“I’m hurt. I rate second after the new girl who barely lasted a month?“

“Have to find them first,” Golem said.

I’ll help with that, I thought. Then I stopped. “Golem, the password? Horsefly.”

“Steeple. And gauntlet, to reply to the last one,” his voice came over the comms.

I stopped. We’d agreed on a simple password set. There was a pattern, each corresponding to our powers and the various pieces on a chessboard. Mine were related to bugs, his to hands. It was abstract, something that tended to only make sense in retrospect. The chess ones we knew off by heart, because they were the first ones we’d practiced.

Screamer wasn’t stupid, but was she that smart? The ‘stag’ should have thrown her off regarding our pattern.

“It works,” I said. “Ant.I’m close.”

If that was Golem, he wasn’t as focused as we needed him to be.

I could feel the effect as my bugs entered the radius of Winter’s power. She wasn’t concentrating it, so it was mild at best. Slowing the movements of molecules, cutting down the ambient temperature, to the point that the moisture in the air froze. It also affected my bugs. Torpor.

For anyone within, it would include a mental torpor.

If the only members of the Nine who were present were Crimson, Winter, Cherish and Screamer, then this was a fight that involved attrition. Attacking Russia in the wintertime. Psychological warfare, emotional warfare, the effects of Winter’s power… it meant that Winter’s guns and Crimson’s power were the only physical threats.

They were going easy on him at the outset.

Golem was walking on rooftops at the edge of the effect, and he was surrounded by a nimbus of whirling material. By Wanton. We’d already altered all of the data on the group, to imply by news reports and Golem’s powers on the websites that Wanton’s telekinetic storm was Golem’s power.

The vantage point put him high enough that he could stand above the mist without being in it. From the moment he engaged, he’d have to move fast. He’d have to be indirect-

“We expected this,” I answered. Iron fist was the ‘king’ in our chess sequence of passwords. “Crab. Get the info and go.”

“I’m not that foolish,” Screamer whispered, her voice extending throughout the entire area. “Underestimating me, for shame. I give up the information, and you leave me for your clean up squad to execute. I want concessions.”

“Concessions?” Golem had left his channel open.

“Let’s ensure your friends aren’t in a good state to mop up. We’ll start with this Weaver. Why don’t you cut off your toes, Weaver? Keep you from running after us.“

I frowned.

“Oh, you’ve got an alternative? Something you can cut off or throw away? Yes. Let’s put off the self-mutilation and have you throw that off the edge of a building.“

Chances were good that she was in Cherish’s company, getting information from the source.

“What if she tosses it, then walks into the mist?” Golem suggested.

No, not Golem. Her. Screamer. An easier suggestion to acknowledge if I thought it came from a teammate.

“Not buying it, huh?” he asked. She asked.

She’d narrowed down my location, was refining her voices. That had been convincing. I had to move, make it harder for her.

I advanced, but I didn’t step into the mist. The closer I got, the more of the affected area I could sense. The torpor forced me to be efficient, to manage where bugs went and how, to check areas in a cursory way. There were a number of people still in Winter’s area of influence. People were standing utterly still, slowly dying as the cold ate away at them.

I want to kill myself.

My own voice, indistinguishable from the one in my head. Fuck me. She had a bead on me, now.

It’ll be painless, a way to avoid all of the horror, so I don’t have to watch my friends die. So I won’t have to watch Bitch or Tattletale or Imp die the way Regent did. So I don’t have to watch Grue die.

No, a moment’s consideration and the spell was broken. I’d stopped thinking of Rachel as ‘Bitch’ some time ago.

“Aw,” Screamer whispered. “Golem’s refusing my deal, and Cherish says you’re not playing along with the rest of it, so I’m gonna have words with some of the others.”

I raised a hand to my ear, opening my mouth to warn them, “…”

My lips moved, but my voice didn’t come out. Bare whispers of sound formed, instead, even as I raised my voice to a near shout.

That would be the next stage in her tactics. Isolate. She had a sense of my voice, the way I spoke, and was canceling it out.

I signaled Golem with my bugs. I drew a smiley face in the air with my bugs, crossing out the mouth with an ‘x’.

He nodded.

So he was on mute as well.

There.

In the midst of a small duplex, there were two young women huddled together on an upper floor. There were computers arranged around them, and each was playing a different video. In some cases, it was the same video playing, just from a different point in time. Me in the lunchroom with Defiant and Dragon. The New Delhi Endbringer fight. Golem on the news with Campanile.

She had to be almost as good a multitasker as me to take all of that in.

“Tattletale here. Wormtongue. Doing damage control. I’ve got your video feed, so you can spell things out for me if you want to give the signal.“

I spelled out the word ‘thanks’.

My bugs had died inside the area of cold. The people inside wouldn’t be doing much better. I had to send another batch in. This time, I knew the destination.

Cherish was acting as the eyes, Screamer as communications. No doubt Screamer -all nine of the Screamers- was providing communications between this group and the nearest group of Nine. She was talking, in a low and steady voice, but her voice wasn’t more than a murmur. No doubt someone in a more distant location was receiving the intel at a normal volume.

And all of that raised the question of what Winter and Crimson were doing. I scanned the building. Nothing on the top floor, or the next lowest. Further downstairs, a number of people were in the sway of Winter’s power, their thoughts slowed to a crawl.

The basement of the same building. Winter, Crimson, and their hostages. Some would be the ones from Killington. Others were ones that had fallen into the sway of Winter’s torpor. Crimson was feeding on them.

His schtick was a little bit of a vampire one, but the end result was more Mr. Hyde. Big, muscular, fueled by rage and impulse.

The ones lying on the floor, cold, they’d be dead already.

I spelled out basic instructions for Golem, pointing the way to the building, drawing a cloud over the building to mark it. He gave me a thumbs up.

Another arrow pointed him to the concrete rooftop behind him. There, I drew out a basic layout.

And in that same moment, Cherish cottoned on to what we were doing.

“They’re attacking,” Cherish said.

Screamer’s voice reached all of us. “Cocky, cocky.“

Screamer turned her head, swatted at the bugs that crawled on her face, and then spoke, silent to the insect’s hearing.

Winter and Crimson reacted.

Sure hope your boy can fight. Screamer was talking in my head again. Not telepathy, only hearing a voice that sounded damn close to the one in my head.

Crimson made his way outside. His flesh would be engorged, purple-red, the veins would be standing out. He’d be as hard as iron, strong. His sword was as long as he was tall. I couldn’t get a good measure of its appearance or quality.

Winter hung back with the hostages.

I wrote out the information with bugs. Tattletale relayed it. “Crimson Incoming. Quisling. Got confirmation and you’re good to go. Six stories, elbow deep.“

Golem turned his head, no doubt in response to the warning, then turned back to my diagram.

I’d given it a title, words running along the top. ‘Slap them down.’

Golem’s uniform was roughly the same as the early incarnations, though solidified into a more solid color scheme, dark iron and silver. The materials differed, but it matched.

There had been one or two additions, though. The rigging of different panels included a frame that looped over the shoulders, much like a rollcage. Golem paused, then drew out a panel, attaching it to the right. He began to reach inside.

And a hand emerged from the center of the street, large enough that it could hold a car inside it. Crimson paused as he watched it appear.

Then he moved. It was the kind of movement that came with super strength, a bounding, powerful stride that could have carried him through a wall. He had to pause before he reached the base of the building Golem stood atop.

Crimson ascended, climbing the outside of the building while holding his six-foot blade in his teeth, blood trickling down from the corners of his mouth where the blade was cutting into flesh.

My bugs died of the cold before I saw what happened next. I was forced to send in a second wave to see.

The bugs were too slow, but the upper edge of the roof was outside of Winter’s realm of influence. I could sense Golem reaching out with a hand of brick, a gentle push on Crimson’s collarbone with his left hand, pushing him away from the roof, away from any point where he could get a grip.

Crimson reached out and up for the hand, but the material broke apart as he put too much weight on it. He dropped. I’d bemoaned the effectiveness of rooftop combat, but Golem made it his own.

Golem advanced to the edge of the roof and created more hands, trying to bind the villain to the street. An arm lock, a headlock…

Crimson pulled his way free of the asphalt shackles through sheer brute strength. More appeared, but he destroyed them faster than they could be created.

Screamer and Cherish had to know what we were doing, yet they weren’t moving. Cockiness?

No. They had to have an escape route.

Except they didn’t have a teleporter. That left only a few options. Siberian wasn’t one I could do a whole lot about, but she’d be fighting if she were anywhere nearby. The others…

I drew out silk thread in their direction. Only so much to spare. I knotted it between their necks and the computers that surrounded them.

Theo’s massive hand was still growing, the wrist exposed. Almost halfway there.

Crimson ascended the building once more. This time, he had support.

Together, we’d gone over the various members of the Nine, past and present, we’d detailed battle plans, the techniques we knew about, even contacted heroes who had encountered them in the past, for stuff that might not have gone on record.

But Screamer was called screamer for a reason, and there wasn’t a lot we could do to stop it, not unless we wanted to deafen ourselves.

Crimson was three stories up the side of the building when Screamer used her namesake power. She could ensure that everyone within a mile’s radius could hear her voice as if she was right next to them, and she used it now, producing a high-pitched, full volume scream, right in my ears. In Golem’s ears. Everyone’s ears.

I joined Golem in doubling over, using my hands to try and ward off the sound. It didn’t help as much as it should have. It was loud, deafening, and it was leaving Golem vulnerable as Crimson closed the distance. He wasn’t recovering fast enough.

Bugs flowed into Screamer’s open mouth, much as they had with Alexandria.

I gave Tattletale the signal. All out attack.

This was it. They’d been okay with a little bit of involvement on our part. Tattletale had speculated they would. There were only a few who were so regimented they would report it to Jack at the first opportunity. Winter was among them, but she was largely in the dark, here. Screamer wouldn’t fill her in if it meant spoiling the fun.

In truth, the only ones who wouldn’t let us get away with this were Mannequin and King. King was distinct enough for me to notice, and Tattletale was ninety-five percent sure Mannequin would need more time to set up. This was an approach we could only use with this first skirmish.

But whoever we were up against, the moment they started losing, the moment we actually pulled an offensive, the line was crossed. This was an all or nothing.

Stinging bugs attacked Cherish, going for the eyes, nose and mouth. Screamer choked. Somewhere in the midst of it, they managed to give a signal. It wouldn’t be Screamer. Cherish? Creating an emotional push?

Winter made her way out from downstairs, hefting a grenade launcher.

I spelled out words for the camera: Need Reinforcements.

“The other teams are getting harassed, can’t close the distance.”

I was going to spell out a response, get further details, but my focus shifted as Winter caught sight of Golem and Crimson and advanced.

Her dynamic with Crimson was one of synergy. She captured people so he could feed. He was the front line so she could safely attack from range. She slowed down opponents so he could advance. He was immune to her munitions fire, in large part.

My bugs swarmed her, but she was already concentrating her power. Smaller area, greater effect. She still held the people in the building in the area, but my bugs were lasting only a fraction of the time. Seconds. I activated my flight pack and approached.

Golem finished creating his hand, but there was a limit to what he could do with it. It stood there, tall and useless.

No, his focus was on escape. He thrust both hands into two different panels, slightly out of sync. One hand was created, almost twice the usual size, and another was simultaneously created from the palm of that same hand, a fraction smaller.

Campanile’s idea.

Both hands thrust out at virtually the same speed that Golem might have stuck his own hand out into the air, but that speed was compounded by the fact that both hands thrust out in unison. Golem set one foot down and vaulted himself up and out to land on the adjacent building, one story up. He spun around as he landed.

Crimson gave chase, crossing the rooftop with heavy footsteps.

Golem jabbed out with one hand as Crimson bent his knees to leap. The hand that appeared jabbed at the underside of one foot, lifting it.

It was the sort of trick that would only work once on an enemy. The next time, the enemy would adjust, or jump off one foot. Here, it caused Crimson to stumble. He missed his mark, the jump failing, and he nearly ran straight off the end of the rooftop. He struck out with his sword, slamming it into the brick of the building face opposite him.

Winter raised her grenade launcher and fired. Golem managed to vault himself away as he had earlier, a shallow movement that was forceful enough to nearly launch him off the building. He rolled on landing as the grenade disintegrated a corner of the building.

These two were warriors. Crimson was a mainstay of King’s era, when he’d ruled the Nine as more of a brute squad, not dissimilar to the Teeth back in Brockton Bay. I had trouble marking why Winter had been recruited, but it likely had more to do with how she was off the battlefield, her predilections for torturing people she’d caught in her torpor.

I reached the edge of the battlefield. My bugs streamed forth, a silk cord trailing between and behind them. The silk streamed out from the spinning spool at my belt. Hundreds of feet of material, and it extended out towards Winter.

It was only a matter of feet from her when she jumped, startled, leaping to one side. I missed, and my bugs were dying in a matter of seconds. The cord went slack.

A moment later, she was looking around, confused.

Cherish, I thought. She alerted her, a burst of alarm.

It didn’t matter. My swarm approached from the other direction, finding and picking up the dropped cord. Moving them within Winter’s effect range was a matter of relay, handing off to fresh bugs as they died. Slow but steady progress.

The moment the silk thread was around Winter’s neck, I dropped down to the edge of the rooftop, and used the mechanical arms on my flight pack to reel in the cord.

Darwin’s spider silk. Stronger than kevlar, a narrow cord of it made for a thin, almost unbreakable cord. The noose cut into her neck, and my arms and legs provided leverage to keep me still as the combined efforts of the mechanical arms provided the strength.

When she reached the base of the building I stood on, she was lifted off the ground. I shifted my position to improve my leverage and waited, hiding.

I could barely tell in the midst of her power, but I sensed her raising her arm. Raising the grenade launcher.

Nets of spider silk peeled away from the gray-white portions of my costume as my bugs pulled them free. I drew it out, connected the narrow sheets with knots of more silk.

It moved into place just in time to catch the projectile out of the air.

Golem managed to find a moment to use his power. A hand of stone struck the grenade launcher from Winter’s hands.

He was holding his own against Crimson, who was adapting. Golem thrust one hand into his armor to create a hand beneath Crimson, and the villain leaped closer, forcing Golem to vault himself away and maintain a safe distance. The sword swipe that followed after Golem’s retreat passed within a foot of the hero.

Wanton, surrounding Golem, advanced on Crimson, and Golem tossed out a bag.

Wanton took hold of the bag and emptied it of its contents. Razor blades, caltrops, hooks and my threads joined the miniature maelstrom, and Crimson was slowly bound. He tore some free, but it found its way into his flesh again a moment later.

Then Golem slid his right hand into his armor. Crimson leaped in anticipation of an imminent attack, landed, and then glanced back at the point where he’d come.

A rumble marked Golem’s real direction of attack. A second hand, down on the street below, gripping the large, six-story tower he’d created earlier in the fight, pulling it down.

It toppled on top of the building that Winter and Crimson had emerged from.

Toppled towards Screamer and Cherish.

In that same moment, Chuckles made an appearance. He moved so fast it was almost as though he teleported, appearing beside the two girls. My bugs barely had time to make contact and try to get a sense of him before he was moving again, holding the two villains this time.

They jerked to a stop. I felt a fraction of the same confusion Chuckles no doubt did. I sensed his arms, extended to ridiculous lengths. He realized they were caught, bound to the computers. Too entangled to take along.

And then he was gone, out of the building as the hand struck home. Two floors crushed, the two villains crushed with them.

Tecton had provided the calculations on what the building could withstand, I’d provided the general data and information on where the hostages were. The damage was controlled, the hand crashing a specific, certain distance into the building before coming to a halt.

“Bitch and Foil tried to intercept Chuckles just now as he left the city. He escaped, but Foil hit him with one shot,” Tattletale said.

Crimson was only staring at the wreckage. He mumbled something around a bloated tongue.

Does he think Winter’s still in there?

Then Crimson charged Golem once again.

Golem had both hands free, and he used the same double-hand technique to strike again. A second hand, sprouting from the first, which emerged from the rooftop in turn. The hands caught Crimson in the side of the leg, slamming into the knee, using the curve of the thumb to catch the leg and limit the range of movement.

Strong as Crimson was, he was still bound by physics and general physical limitations. Being struck in the knees hurt, and he still needed to maintain a sense of balance. He toppled.

Another double-hand strike, and Golem caught Crimson in the groin as he landed on his hands and feet, shoved him off to the right.

Two more strikes, this time not doubled-up, catching Crimson in the left arm and left leg, respectively, keeping him off-balance.

The key was to deny leverage.

An arm looped over one leg and one arm, binding them to the rooftop. Crimson tore free with little effort, but the act meant he shifted his weight to one side. Golem capitalized on it with another double-speed strike to his side, pushing in the same direction the blood-gorged killer was already moving. That was followed in turn by one larger hand, moving slower, to scoop Crimson up and tip him off the edge of the rooftop.

Crimson fell. Not a fatal fall, but it would hurt some.

A gauntlet of concrete seized the large hand Golem had just created and tore it free of the rooftop, then let it roll free to fall right on top of Crimson.

With the villain in an alley, the ensuing takedown was just as brutal and tenacious as before, with the added advantage that there were walls on either side to strike from. Hands struck out, and they remained there. As the villain was denied any footing, any balance, the hands around him increased in number, folding around him, sliding into gaps.

It was a parallel to Kaiser’s pyramid of blades technique, that he’d used to try to entrap Lung. I’d passed it on to Golem, but I hadn’t told him the source. I got the sense he wouldn’t appreciate it.

I turned my attention to Winter, who dangled beneath me. She’d gone silent and still. I continued to wait, but I raised one hand to my ear. “Tattletale? All four are down.”

I could speak. A benefit to Screamer being dead.

“Good. Too soon to tell if Jack’s got wind of what you’re doing. But if Chuckles passes on word, or if there’s a Nice Guy in the area…”

“I wouldn’t think he’d use the same guy twice in a row.”

“No,” Tattletale agreed. “The numbers fit, makes sense he’d start with four with a fifth as backup, considering how he can scale up the numbers in successive attacks. Still-”

“There was no graceful way to do it with Cherish there, and I couldn’t not help. Golem was incapacitated.”

“I’ll let Chevalier know what happened?” she made it a question.

I sighed. No point in keeping secrets amongst ourselves.

“Do. And send Foil here,” I said. “She can punch a few holes in Crimson while he’s trapped.”

“Will do.”

I waited another minute as Winter dangled from the thread, then cut her free. Her body crumpled in a heap at the base of the building. I made my way over to Golem and Wanton, where Wanton was still in his breaker form.

This was the warm-up, for the Nine, for us. Four down, two hundred and seventy-some to go. Jack had a little information on us, no doubt.

I didn’t dare hope it would stay this simple. We still needed to find a way to narrow down Jack’s location, killing him. He already had an advantage, wearing us down, costing us time, and he surely had some intel on us.

I could only hope that intel didn’t include the fact that Golem had help.

“Chevalier here. We have reports that they’re showing themselves for the next locations.“

I met Golem’s eyes.

“Locations, plural?” Golem asked.

“They want you to choose,” I answered him, as the realization dawned on me.

He stared at me, lost. He was heaving for breath, his hands shaking visibly, even with gauntlets on.

“Go with the Chicago teams. I’ll take the Undersiders and Brockton Bay Wards to the other location,” I said.

He nodded, pressing one hand to his ear as he started making his way to the ground. I watched him for a moment, then took off.

This was a statement, I suspected. I could guess what that statement was. Jack fully intended to double down on the challenge each time we came out ahead.

The smell. Summer heat, the mingled scent of blood, shit and overripe bodies, with traces of other things in the wind. Caustic chemicals, ozone, smoke, burned flesh and plastic.

It wasn’t unfamiliar. Not an exact combination of smells I’d smelled before, but it put me in mind of Brockton Bay in the days soon after Leviathan had attacked.

I looked up at the man who’d been strung up overhead, spread-eagled. Chains stretched from his wrists to buildings on opposite sides of the street, and more chains extended from his ankles to the bases of the same buildings. A number was carved on his chest. One-seventeen.

Beneath him, the sign from outside the town limits had been slammed down onto the hoods of two cars so it stood upright.

Welcome to Killington. Heart of the Green Mountains.

They probably thought it was funny. Especially with the bloody handprint on the word ‘heart’.

“They got the children too,” Cozen whispered, as she averted her eyes from a mother who had died holding her child, both burned black. The only parts of their body that hadn’t burned were patches of skin in the shapes of numbers. Two-fifty-four. Two-fifty-five.

Two of the Red Hands, Getaway and Rifle, had come along for the ride. They were sticking close by her, and formed a small contingent with Grue as a consequence. Getaway wore a cowl with a hood that peaked in the front, to the center of his mask. His costume had straight, clean lines, as though he’d modeled it after a car.

Rifle, by contrast, didn’t look like he wore a costume. He was dressed like a special ops agent, complete with a complicated night-vision mount around his eyes, a number of scopes with lenses glowing in hues ranging from blue to red. Violet scopes were currently fixed over his real eyes. He carried a weapon, a modified gun that wasn’t, as far as I could figure it, an actual rifle. It looked like it was set to fire specialized loads from canisters.

Of course they got children, I thought. I had to bite back a retort. Why was she here, if she wasn’t ready for this?

But she wasn’t a fighter. None of the Red Hands were, really. They were professional thieves. Break in, get out, sell the goods.

They were, maybe, what the Undersiders might have been with a little more luck, slightly different personalities, and a quieter existence.

Without me, even.

The Undersiders had made it for a year and a few months with their original strategy, avoiding fights, slipping away, staying off the radar. They would fight when they had to, but they didn’t make it a thing. The fact that they didn’t have firepower meant they couldn’t make it a thing. If anyone got into trouble, it was the dogs.

And then I joined. Starting with the bank robbery, I pushed them to switch up tactics, catch the enemy off guard.

If I’d never joined, what would have happened? Maybe the bank robbery wouldn’t have worked out, and one of them would have been picked off and arrested. Maybe they would have taken a different direction with the robbery.

Bakuda might have killed them, Coil might have pushed them to be more aggressive as he scaled up his plans. Or they could have found a way, could have continued going the way they did, less violent in general.

Some good, some bad. Rachel might never have reached the point she was at now. Grue wouldn’t necessarily have gone through what he did. Regent might be alive.

I glanced again at Cozen, saw her looking at me in turn. Catching me looking, really.

“What?” she asked.

You don’t need to be here. You’ll be happier in the long run if you aren’t.

“Nothing,” I responded. She looked annoyed, but she didn’t say anything.

There was a kind of art to the setup. No doubt at all that it was a display, a showpiece. Trails of blood, ash and other substances marked where bodies had been moved. They were spaced out just enough that we would run into a fresh one just as we left the last behind.

I might have missed it if not for my swarm-sense. The bodies were placed at positions high and low, the methods of death differing here and there, but there was a pattern to their distribution. The kind of pattern that might become clear if one were to set up a map and note the location of each body on it. A spiral.

I pointed the way to the central point of the spiral. I could see a plume of smoke in that general direction. Not the middle of Killington. Skewed off-center.

“Weaver, report,” Revel’s voice.

“I’m here,” I responded. I kept a finger at my ear to make it clear that I wasn’t talking to myself.

“Killington?”

“Yes. Progress is slow. I’m sweeping the area for traps and potential ambush, and I’m marking a path to travel for when the others get here.”

“We saw the two traps at the outset. There are more confirmed?”

“Yeah. I’m not touching anything. Pass on word that any capes entering the area should be hands off. I activated one and it was only a decoy, a prelude to a gas attack. One of Bonesaw’s, I think. Grue warded it off. No casualties.”

“I’ll make doubly sure to pass on word about the traps and about the route you’ve cleared. I would have warned them anyways. The initial casualties were enough, with the helicopter and first responders. Give me a second.”

I led the way as our group rounded a corner, and saw the smouldering wreckage of the helicopter, smoke still streaming skyward.

The collision apparently hadn’t been enough to topple the corpse that stood upright in the middle of the intersection, desiccated. A number was drawn on the mummy’s chest in blood. Number thirty-six.

I could make out a tripwire strung between him and another corpse, a woman. She had apparently been shot execution style, propped upright on her knees. A number, again, had been drawn out in the midst of the blood spatter from the original wound. Number two-sixty-five.

The tripwire was almost obvious, coated in congealed blood.

Red string, I thought. In Japanese superstition, it was the string that bound lovers.

The pieces suggested Crimson and Winter. Neither was Japanese, but the idea of mingling romantic imagery with violence in that way fit them. The red knight and the soldier.

“Only part of it. The way the bodies are laid out, it’s a spiral. I think it all points to something. Making our way in.”

“Technically you aren’t. You’ve stopped.”

“Tripwires,” I said. “Being very, very careful.”

“I like being careful,” Imp commented. She’d only be hearing one side of the conversation. “Careful is good. Keeps us alive.”

“Being too careful gets you killed,” Rachel commented. Of everyone present, she seemed least concerned with the amount of death that surrounded us. Then again, that didn’t surprise me. “Have to act when you see the chance.”

“You want to hop on your dog’s back and charge ahead?” Imp asked. “Go activate every trap between here and wherever?”

Rachel frowned. “No.”

“I like careful,” Imp restated, for the record. “Let’s be careful.”

“Yeah. Fine.”

I pointed to indicate. “Obvious tripwire here. Covered in blood. Connects to the two bodies and… I think claymores, at the base of that building over there. There are other tripwires around it. Look too hard at it, miss the others. I think there’s a pressure plate, too. I’m not sure what to call that.”

“I don’t see anything that could be a pressure plate,” Grue observed.

I pointed at a pane of glass at the base of a pile of rubble. It was broken, with a narrow thread of wood still attached along the one edge that was straight and unbroken.

“Maybe. Kind of hard to believe,” he said.

Because we could see through it? Yeah. But it was situated beside a pile of rubble, and the balance of the glass with the surrounding brick and concrete seemed too convenient.

Was there something attached to the edge of the glass where we couldn’t see? If the glass was broken, would the wood weigh the remaining fragment down and pull something?

“Let’s play it safe. We avoid the tripwires, we avoid the glass.”

“Whatever you say. I’m all for playing safe,” he responded.

I led the way around the trap. I left a trail of dead bugs behind us as we made our way to the center, murdering them with larger bugs and mashing them into the ground. A path.

I wondered about Grue. Couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t note his tone either. Was he thinking about the same thing I was thinking?

We’d already fallen for one trap. Not here, but back in Brockton Bay. Back then, when he’d had his second trigger event.

It had been the Nine, back then, and though he wasn’t giving me any clues there was something wrong, he wasn’t indicating that he was his old self, from back in the good old days. I suspected he hadn’t fully bounced back, even after all this time, might never.

We circled around eight teenage girls, sitting in a circle, crowns of splintered wood nailed through their skulls. One had fallen over in response to the wind, but the others were still upright, propped up with wooden planks nailed into their spines. Less blood than the head wounds, I noted. Some pre-death, others post?

The numbers were on the pieces of wood, registration numbers or something from the crate that had been smashed for materials. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine.

I looked up. Number eight sat on the bulb of a street light, a long dress blowing in the wind, directly above the circle. Her crown was the tallest, and for her to be so rigid, there had to be a whole assortment of planks nailed to her.

“Nine Kings,” I said.

“A woman king?” Imp asked.

“She’s the victim,” I said. The killer is her… husband, for lack of a better word.”

“They’ve resurrected all of the old members. Cloned them,” Revel said.

Clones, I mused, agreeing. My suspicions were confirmed, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d hoped for different, but the reality of what we faced had been hinted at early on, when it had been revealed that the Nine had hit a tinker’s laboratory and made off with materials that could be used to mass produce lifeforms.

King. The leader, the founder of the group. Were the numbers in an order corresponding to when they had joined, then? Would the second member of the Nine be ten through eighteen?

“Got a live one!” Imp called out, interrupting my thoughts. “…Kind of alive.”

I turned to look. A fat man was shifting in a restless way, his chest rising and falling quickly in unsteady movements. One arm jerked.

“Leave him,” I said. “Don’t touch.”

“He could be a witness,” Rifle said.

“Or a trap,” I responded. “I doubt he’s in a state to fill us in on anything. We’ll move on, wait for heroes to follow the path I’m marking. They’ll handle medical care for wounded.”

“That’s fucked up,” Rifle said. “We could at least put him out of his misery, then.”

“I’m not willing to get close enough to check,” I said. “And I’m not willing for you to get close either.”

“I-” Parian started.

Then she stopped. The fat man deflated in an instant as a small collection of what looked like trilobites found their way out of his rear end. Slick with gore, they darted forward a short distance on their hundreds of little legs, then turned our way, bristling with spines. Tails trailed behind each of them, twice as long as the foot-long creatures, narrow, with stingers on the ends.

I could hear a hissing, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the creatures or the way the spines rubbed against one another.

“Oh… god,” she said. She took a step back, with Foil stepping forward, as if to defend her.

“Breed’s power,” I said. “They’re mostly harmless, for now.”

“For now?” Rifle asked.

I watched as they made their way up the side of a building to a corpse that was hung there. The corpse had been cut into sections, the arms and legs each severed at the joints and reconnected with lengths of chain. Breed’s creatures found their way into the body through the holes in the neck, mouth and rear end. It jerked a little as they worked bodies the size of footballs into apertures only a fraction of that size, then went still.

“For now,” I answered Rifle. “They start off the size of a lemon, lurk in spots where they can get access to orifices or sites of injury, or like you see here, corpses. Inside beer bottles, in toilet bowls, bedcovers, on the underside of kitchen tables, even inside food. Then they burrow inside, wait until the target is still and quiet for an hour or two, paralyze the target, and emit pheromones to call others of their kind to them. They devour the target from the inside out, molt once or twice as they digest the fats and proteins they ate, then find a new target. It’s a process that takes a week to two weeks, depending on the availability of food sources.”

I could see Getaway shift position, folding his hands behind his back, as if he could shield his rear end. His mouth had shut into a firm line.

His nose was still unprotected, I noted.

Even Rachel seemed a little concerned. She glanced at her dog.

“They aren’t a danger to us,” I said. “Probably. They choose easier targets over harder ones, and there are enough corpses around here that we aren’t worth the trouble. What we should worry about is the later stages. When they’re about the size of a full-grown human being, they’ll do two or three major molts with big physical changes, gaining some natural weapons, including a pellet-spit that kind of acts like a shotgun blast with fragments that dissolve into flesh-melting acid.”

“Um.” Rifle said.

“You know this how?” Imp asked.

“Read his file,” I answered.

“Shouldn’t we kill them before they get big?” Foil asked.

“Not worth the time it would take to track them down,” I said. “We don’t have any strong offensive powers, they’re durable against stuff like conventional ammunition and physical blows, and he generally produces about nine or ten per day.”

“That was ten,” Getaway said.

“Even assuming it’s only been one day since Breed woke up,” I said, “The scenes they’ve left behind suggest there are nine clones of each copy of the Nine. Going by the numbers-”

“Twenty-nine copies, at least,” Revel said.

“Twenty-nine copies,” I said. “Two-hundred-and-fifty-plus members of the Nine currently active. Nine Breeds among them, meaning there’re probably nine other clusters around here, taking advantage of abundant food.”

“Breed’s creatures. Can you control them?” this from Revel, taking advantage of the stunned silence.

I glanced up at the body the things had invaded. I tailored my response so both Revel and the Undersiders could make sense of it. “I can’t control those things, and I can’t sense them either.”

“A shame. That would simplify things just a little.”

It would. I wouldn’t have minded the firepower, either, even with their particular diet.

“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “If we stop for every horror show, we might be stuck here a while. My gut’s telling me time is of the essence.”

“I’m feeling a little out of my depth,” Getaway said, his voice quiet, as he fell into step to keep up.

“That’s a good instinct,” I replied without looking at him. “Trust it.”

“You’re telling me to leave?”

“I can’t make you do anything,” I said.

“But you think I should leave?”

“If you feel like you should, yeah.”

“And does that extend to me and Rifle?” Cozen asked, her tone cold.

“I don’t know. Yeah, if your instincts tell you to go, then get going now,” I said. I pointed at the ground around a hose. There was a puddle that had spread beneath the hose’s opening. My bugs had died on contact with it. “Acid, not water. Don’t walk in it. Rachel, watch your dogs.”

Rachel grunted acknowledgement.

“Don’t change the subject. You want us gone,” Cozen said.

“No. All the help we can get is appreciated,” I said. I glanced at her. “At the same time, if push comes to shove and you can’t hold it together, it’s going to hurt us all.”

“You don’t think we can hold it together?” Cozen asked.

“You’re an unknown quantity. Anyone else that’s here, I can trust them to hold their own because I know how they operate. I don’t know you. I don’t know how you react in a crisis, how you’ll respond if you’re pushed to the edge, one way or another. Grue and the others are vouching for you, so I’m shelving those concerns and trusting they have a good sense of your abilities. I’ll maintain that trust until you give me an indication I shouldn’t. Getaway saying he’s spooked is an indication.”

“I’m spooked,” Imp said. “Can I go home and sit on the couch in my underwear, eating cake? I’ll cross my fingers for you guys, if you want.”

“I’m not an Undersider,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m in charge anyways.”

And Grue can speak for himself, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud.

I could see her reacting to that, even without the extra quip. I watched expressions cross her face: irritation, anger, indignation, and a trace of fear.

“Grue is a good leader,” I said, “But this is my project. Something I’ve been working towards and thinking about for the last two years. Leaving the Undersiders, making contacts, helping hold things together, maintaining the peace and eliminating possible issues. Everything I did, it’s been to prepare for this in some fashion.”

“A little unilateral, don’t you think?”

“It’s her project,” Grue said. “My orders are to follow her orders.”

I could see how little she liked that.

But she maintained a professional demeanor. “Accepted. You realize we don’t have to follow your orders?”

Grue nodded, silent.

Cozen seemed to come to a decision. “We will anyways. As Weaver pointed out, this is unfamiliar ground for us. We’ll defer to your experience.”

“Thank you,” Grue and I said, almost in sync.

I turned away to hide my smile, in case it could be made out beneath the fabric of my mask.

Progress was slow. The traps seemed to accrue in number as we drew closer to the center, as did the corpses. More than once, we were forced to take the long way around, as traps or pools of acid barred our paths.

We passed an area with rows of identical looking cabins, then ran into the Protectorate. Chevalier, Exalt, and others, examining the area, a block and a half away.

I got their attention, then pointed in the direction we were headed. It wasn’t much more effort to mark out traps around them as well. I made sure to mark each with a cluster of bugs, and bug-letters spelling out the nature of the danger. Less trouble to move in parallel directions than reunite.

The center of the spiral wasn’t the center of the town in a geographic sense, but in a sense of where the town’s heart and focus were. We closed in on the front steps of what looked to be a town hall. Empty ski racks stood to our right, two draped with corpses that had been flung and broken over them.

By the time we were halfway through the plaza, navigating a maze where we tried to find a path that didn’t force us to tread on potential traps or corpses, Tecton and the others had caught up, reaching the edge of the area.

“Thoughts?” Revel asked. “Before you reach the center of the display?”

“He wanted to present this for effect,” I said. “It’s why he set up Pyrotechnical’s stuff to blow any aircraft out of the sky. The traps are to force us to take our time, force us to savor it.”

“Savor?” Grue asked.

“Everything Jack does is for effect. The same way a dog sort of raises its hackles to look bigger, tougher, or the way we used our reputation to seem more unstoppable than we were, Jack keys his actions for psychological effect. All of this is to scare, to drive us to hesitate when it comes to confronting him, push us to think of ways to avoid dealing with him instead of ways to catch up to him and beat his face in. Or, conversely, some personality types might get pushed to be reckless, to deal with him so he couldn’t bother them anymore.”

I glanced at Rachel as I said that last bit. She’d instructed her dogs to stay, so they wouldn’t trip any of the traps in our way.

I made my way over a hump of bodies. The members of the Nine who’d spilled acid all over the place had melted nine police officers and left them in a heap. Crawler? Only one that fit.

Our destination was the kind of spot, like a courthouse’s steps, where someone could give a speech. There were two objects covered in tarps, a man who was in a reclining position at the far end of the stairs, and ten dead bodies arrayed in a star shape, limbs bent to mark the direction of the spiral.

I checked under the tarps, then bit my lip.

I turned around and gave Golem instructions as he made his way past the traps. He created platforms to step over to serve as a shortcut. Grace, Tecton, Wanton and Cuff hung back, looking grim. They were joined by Chevalier and the others.

Golem joined me at the top of the stairs.

“How’s your headspace?” I asked.

“Terrified.”

“In a way that’s going to impact our job here?”

“No. No. You told me what to expect. Kind of. I didn’t imagine this.”

I shook my head. “No.”

There was a voice from beneath the other tarp. A strangled scream.

“What was that?”

“A recording,” I lied. Then I elaborated. “It’s a trap. Two tarps, have to guess the right one. Guess the wrong one and you blow up. This one. Move the tarp.”

He hesitated.

“Trust me,” I said. Even as I lie for everyone’s benefit.

Rachel and Golem worked together to move the tarp aside.

A television.

“The tape’s already in the machine, you can hit play to start it,” the man sitting at the edge of the stairs said.

“Wait, Weaver, stop. Who was that?” Revel asked.

“Who?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Look to your right.”

I did. The other tarp, more corpses, the man who was now standing at the edge of the stairs, the little crenelation at the top of the stair’s railing, then beyond that, cabins, restaurants, hotels and motels, the rest of the town, and mountains in the background.

“There is a person to your right. Not a teammate, former or current. I need you to kill that person, don’t ask why, don’t think too much about it. Draw your knife.”

I drew my knife.

“Look. I’ll tell you who to attack.”

I glanced to my right, my eyes falling on Rachel. It was a bit presumptuous to say she wasn’t a teammate. Not a team player, but she’d done her share.

“No, to her right.”

I looked past the man and set my eyes on Golem.

“I’m more inclined to think you’re a voice in my head that’s fucking with me, than to suspect Golem’s up to something, but-”

“Oh hell,” Revel said.

“I got this. Taylor, do me a favor, give the order to ‘go dark’.”

“Go dark,” I said.

To my left, Grue surrounded himself in thick darkness.

Nothing happened.

“It didn’t work.”

“Wait.”

A spray of blood leaped from the man’s throat. We each stepped away, and I hurried forward to stop Rachel from backing into the other tarp. We watched in stunned silence as blood poured from the wound.

“Hey,” a female voice said, “Do me a favor, let me know if there are any traps at the bottom of the stairs?”

“Who-” Golem started.

“Just tell me.”

“Acid,” I said, raising my knife so I could defend myself if I had to.

Imp appeared as she booted the bleeding man in the small of the back. He rolled down the stairs, leaving spatters and sprays of blood as he made his way down, and then collapsed in a pile of bodies. He started screaming, a gurgling sound.

I could see Chevalier and the others staring in shock, adopting fighting stances, unsure of how to proceed. It looked like Chevalier was talking to someone, gesturing with his free hand. Was it Revel, on the comms?

“My schtick,” Imp spat the words at the dying man.

I could mark the moment he died, because the blanks in my perception began to fill in.

Nice Guy, I thought. I’d badly underestimated the severity of his power. I’d known he would be in their roster, had kept it in mind throughout, even told myself to be ready for him, and then the moment we ran into him, well, he was another face in the crowd. The connection wasn’t possible.

I watched as the acid ate away at him, burns creeping upward and spreading across his flesh, bubbling as it reached the cartilage of his nose and ears.

“Thank you, Tattletale,” Revel said.

“All good.”

“I… think I can tolerate your presence on this channel for the moment. Provided you don’t cause any trouble that makes me regret it.”

“I’d do that anyways. So. One more trap down. Keep in mind there are eight more of him.”

“What was he going to do?” Golem asked.

“Probably ask you all to stand there and stay still while he murdered each of you in turn,” Tattletale said.

“Oh.”

“Tattletale,” I said. “Call my phone, and I’ll put you on speaker.”

“Okay. Let’s see.”

“Six-three-zero-five-five-” Revel started.

My phone rang. I picked up and put Tattletale on speaker, as Revel sighed audibly in my ear.

“Is the video player safe?” I asked. I turned my head towards the television.

“Yeah. All the rest of this, it’s to scare. It’s also meant to delay. Jack probably expected the heroes to take a little while to find this, to get by the traps. The spiral you mentioned, it would have been maybe a day or two before they put the pieces together, then another three to six hours before they navigated it to the center.”

“Yay us,” Imp said.

She got more powerful, I thought. She’d been able to speak while using her power. Nuances.

“Press play.”

I hit the button.

It was Jack, here, in the center of the plaza. The camera wobbled as someone followed him, recording. I could see shadows of the other Slaughterhouse Nine in the background. Hookwolf. Skinslip. Night Hag.

“This message is intended for Theodore Anders. Kaiser’s son. Stop the video here and go find him. Time is of the essence, I should say. How much essence and time you have available depends on how incompetent you heroes are. Hurry now, I’ll wait.”

“No need to wait,” Tattletale commented. “He’s standing right here.”

There were a few looks of surprise at that. Eyes fell on Golem.

There was a pause, then Jack started speaking. “You missed the deadline, Theodore. Simple game of hide and seek, and you had two years to do it, to find and kill me. You failed.”

Golem’s gloves made a small creaking sound as he clenched his fists.

“You remember the deal, right? Two years to find me. Two years, you fight past my minions, you look me in the eye, and then you kill me. And if you fail? A thousand people die. Your sister joins them, and you’re the last on the list.”

“Golem,” Revel said. She started to say something else, but Jack cut her off.

“That pain you feel, that self loathing? The fear and dawning realization of what you’ve done? Capturethat, Theodore Anders. Hold on to that feeling and use it, because I’m pulling your leg.”

Golem startled as if he’d been slapped. His eyes had lowered, and now they returned to the screen.

“Circumstances beyond my control delayed me. So I’m going to do you the favor of extending the deadline, and you’re going to do me the favor of forgiving my lateness. Agreed? Agreed.”

“Can we not agree?” Imp asked, uselessly.

Jack continued. “This is a prelude. See, all of these guys just woke up, and they needed a chance to stretch, flex their abilities and make sure everything works right. Turn the camera around, Bonesaw dear.”

The camera panned around. There were other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine present, standing in a loose half-circle. Hundreds of them. Nine of each. Thirty groups. I recognized most, could guess as to the others, who didn’t have their powers or full transformations going.

In the middle of that semicircle, lying on the ground, civilians had their hands folded on the backs of their heads. In many cases they’d been stacked like cordwood. Many bound, others too terrified to move.

“Oh god,” Golem said.

Jack spoke, his voice calm, clearly relishing this. The camera returned to him, focusing on his face. “I promised a thousand bodies. A thousand kills, if you failed to meet the challenge we set in our bargain. Except there’s a bit of a problem. See, things have changed. The Endbringers have apparently doubled down. Terror is a fact of life. As commodities go, this one has depreciated quite a bit in the time I’ve been gone. We’ve really got to step up my game if I’m going to pass muster and get on the front page of the paper, don’t you agree?”

“No,” Golem said.

Silent, I took his hand, holding it. My eyes didn’t leave the screen as I studied it for details, matching members of the Slaughterhouse Nine to the files I’d studied in recent months.

“Now, I’m still a man of my word,” Jack said. “The original deal stands, of course. That’s why each member of my army here is going to walk away with three or four of the locals here. We’ve whittled down the number to an even nine hundred and ninety-nine. Let’s say you have… hmm. Until the twenty-fourth. Five days.”

We watched in silence.

What’s the rub, the trick?

“If you fail to kill me, I disband the Nine.”

“What?” Imp asked. “What?”

I frowned. Not what I expected.

“That’s not an enticement to leave me alive,” Jack purred the words, sounding pleased with himself. “See, Bonesaw did a very good job of putting my army together. Each is in the prime of their life, fit, in fighting shape.”

“Aw shucks,” a girl’s voice said, offscreen.

“Their psychologies are close to what they should be, all things considered. Except for tweaks, here and there. I’m good when it comes to wrangling the wicked, but Bonesaw apparently felt two hundred and eighty would be too many, even for me. She’s made them loyal. They’ll listen better. The most unpredictable and dangerous have been touched up, the edges rounded off. While interacting with me, anyways. I won’t sully your experience on that front.

“No. They’re obedient and servile only when I require them to be. If you fail in your task, then I’ll give them one last task, to kill the one thousand people we agreed to in the terms of our wager, and then I’ll disband the group. They’ll be free to run rampant, to do as they see fit. Wreak chaos. I’ll take a vacation, sit back with a Mai Tai and watch the show.”

“Fuck me,” Tattletale said.

“Fuck,” I echoed her, agreeing.

Golem, for his part, had gone stone-still.

“I’ll be leaving members of the Slaughterhouse Nine behind at regular intervals as I beat a not-so-hasty retreat. Your choice if you deal with them or leave them be. But if I get one report from them that you’re getting help, one report that you’re using others as a crutch, then that’s it. Order goes out, hostages die, Nine go off leash, and you get to watch the body count rise.”

“Five days, Theodore. Noon on the twenty-fourth. I look forward to meeting you.”

The video cut out.

“Tattletale?” I asked.

“Already on it. Word’s going out to all the major players.”

I noted Chevalier’s approach. He had used Golem’s platform to reach the base of the stairs, stepping around Nice Guy.

“Major players?” Grue asked.

“Everyone Tattletale’s been meeting with,” I said.

“I heard through the feed,” Chevalier said. “The restrictions stand.”

“The restrictions stand,” I agreed. I explained for the benefit of the others. “We treat this as a Simurgh situation. Control feedback, control exposure. Anyone and everyone that potentially comes in contact with Jack could be a factor in Dinah’s end of the world scenario. Powerful individuals are especially important in this. The more powerful they are, the more important it is to minimize or prevent contact.”

“Um. I probably sound dumb as I ask this,” Imp said, raising a hand as if she were asking a question in class, “But what about the nearly-three-hundred lunatic psycho people with crazy powers that he’s threatening to unleash on the world?”

“We’ll deal with them,” I said. “With your okay, Chevalier?”

He fell silent.

“Chevalier, I thought-”

“Yes. You proposed your strike squad. You’ve shown their ability to deal with different situations. Fine. But I’m assigning two tertiary squads to you.”

“Chicago and Brockton Bay teams.”

“I was going to say-”

“They’re teams I’m familiar with,” I said. “Please.”

He fell silent again.

“Work with me here, and if we’re all standing at the end, I’m yours. Whatever you want to use me for, however, it doesn’t matter. If this blows over and the end of the world doesn’t happen, like some think it won’t, then the deal stands.”

“I’ll get in contact with Miss Militia and Crucible.”

“If it’s alright, can we have Clockblocker take control of the Wards for this excursion?”

“On Golem more than me,” I said. “We’re going to cheat our way through this, bend every rule, but it all hinges on Golem being able to hold his own.”

“Jack’s going to try to set Golem up with a long chain of lose-lose situations,” Tattletale said. “Force him to either let the innocents die and maintain the chase, or let Jack pull away. We already got one big advantage by getting to this tape as fast as we did. Let’s not show our hand. Dragon’s on the line. We’ve got Dragon’s Teeth and Azazel models moving to the front.”

“Close in the net, then act decisively,” I said. “Coordinated strikes. If the Thanda are willing, a meteor strike in the right time and place could do wonders.”

There were nods of agreement from around the group.

Golem turned around and walked away.

“Golem,” I said.

He was already halfway down the stairs. He used the panels at his waist to form an even footpath, with hands turned at right angles, positioned where he could put his feet on them.

“Golem!” I called out. I handed my phone to Grue, then hurried after him.

He stopped as he set his foot on the first outstretched hand of pavement, but he didn’t turn around. His voice was low, barely a whisper. “Stop, Taylor. Leave me alone. Please.”

“You’re running?”

“I’m… no. I’m definitely in. I have to be, don’t I?”

“But?”

“But this is a lot to take in. Jack, he talked to me about ripples. About stuff extending outward, the lives that are affected.”

“I remember. You told me that.”

“Right here, in this dinky little ski resort, he murdered a few hundred people, just as a warm up. How many people on the periphery of it all are affected? How many people across America, across the world, know people in Killington? Or know the people who know people in this town?”

“You can’t think about things on that scale.”

“I have to. Jack does, and I have to understand him. If I don’t pay attention to it, if I ignore it all, pursuing only the end result, the target, then I’m acting like my dad. Kind of. Either way, I lose.”

“You care about the people who died, and you’re thinking about them that way for a good reason. That’s not putting you on a path to being like either of them.”

“There’s a reason we go numb, and I get that, but I don’t want to go down that road, not so quickly. Not knowing just how easy it would be to revel in it, or to stop caring about the dead. I’m there, and I’m…”

“What?”

The stoic face on his helm stared down at the ground.

“Theo?”

“I hear you guys talking about it, and you’re right there, in your element. This is something that you’ve been working on for a long time, and there’s almost an excitement to you. Like you’ve been in a kind of stasis for the entire time I’ve known you, and only now are you really coming back to life.”

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“No. I mean, I’m not blaming you, or saying you’re a bad person. You’re good at this, at taking a challenge head on, finding workarounds, manipulating the system to our advantage. You’re doing it for good reasons, to help, to stop bad people. I saw glimmers of that excitement, of the real Weaver, while you were dealing with our bosses, and making connections, offering deals to the bad guys you thought you could bring to our side. But I’ve spent a long time thinking about Jack and watching old footage of him, and figuring out my enemy, my nemesis, and it’s like… that’s you.”

“Me.”

“You’re his nemesis, Weaver. I’m the reason he’s here, the reason these people died like this. But you’re his counterpart, his mirror. You’ve got that same excitement Jack has, you think along the same lines, in strategy and counter-strategy. You thrive on conflict, just like he does. And I… I’m not like that.”

I couldn’t muster a response.

“So right now? You should go back. Forget I said this, because it’s… I’m regretting opening my mouth already. Work on formatting the strategies you already worked out to fit around the rules of Jack’s game, because that’s a good thing. It’s what we need. But let me have half an hour or an hour or however long I need to myself. Until we stop waiting and stop letting Jack think we haven’t found the tape yet. Let me take a moment and think about these people.”

“You’re not to blame for them,” I said. “The Nine would have killed anyways.”

“I know. I get that. But I played a part in the sequence of events, and maybe these people wouldn’t have been the ones to die if I hadn’t made that wager with Jack… and I guess I think everyone else that cares has better things to do. You trained me, the others trained me. I- I guess I’m as ready as I could ever be. I’ll fight when the time comes, wade through the gauntlet he sets in his wake and I’ll succeed or fail. But I’m not a strategist, and these people need someone to mourn them. Let me be useful in my own way, right here, right now.”

I opened my mouth to voice a reply, then shut it.

A moment passed, and Golem set about walking on the hands he’d raised from the ground, just two or so feet above the bodies and the streets that were painted with blood.

I stood where I was, watching as he steadily made his way to the safe zone I’d drawn out on the ground. He stopped only to gesture for Tecton and Grace not to follow, then walked on, out of sight.

It’s not that I don’t care, I thought. But-

But what?

I couldn’t articulate my thoughts.

But… we need a strategist, we need a plan, before all hell breaks loose, I thought. Developing that, coming up with answers, fighting, it’s going to do a lot more good in the long run than compassion all on its own.

I looked down at Nice Guy, at the foot of the stairs, a fleshy mess that was slowly dissolving into the acid pile, which only spread and served as more acid to melt flesh. I realized I was still holding my knife, from the time of the brief skirmish. I sheathed it.

Then, as Golem had told me to, I pushed him, the dead, the maimed and the lost out of mind and turned back to the core group, to offer my services, to coordinate and administrate.

Khonsu allowed himself to be struck by Alexandria, using the impact to float back at a higher speed. The act gave him the positioning he needed to draw his spheres closer to the Jaguars’ contingent.

A lack of coordination, a simple error, and ten capes were caught, to be killed in moments. Moments they experienced as weeks, months and years. Some had brought food and water. I almost pitied those capes.

Moord Nag appeared, riding her shadow’s skull like a surfer might ride a wave, except there wasn’t any joy in the act. Her arms remained still at her sides, her head not fully erect, eyes almost looking down, as if she watched the skull with one eye and Khonsu only merited her peripheral vision.

She didn’t wear armor. Her top was a simple t-shirt with the sleeves removed and bottom half cut off. There was a faded image of a rock band on the front, her bra straps showing through the gaping armholes. Her dress was ankle length, frayed a little at the edges. Her feet were bare, her hair in braids and tied back behind her neck.

The skull dipped close to the ground, and the warlord stepped off as though she was getting off an escalator. The shadow’s head had taken on the appearance of a serpent’s skull, complete with fangs, and the body was a column behind it, stirring around Moord Nag without touching her.

It lunged, and fragments flew off Khonsu’s shoulder as the shadow made contact, rubbed against him. It was as though the shadow’s body were a series of circular saws, a rasp.

Khonsu’s field made contact with the shadow’s body, catching the middle of its body. Moord Nag didn’t even flinch as her serpent was trisected, the middle section dragged away.

The serpent was winding around Khonsu now, maximizing the surface area that was making contact. Khonsu elected to ignore it, floating forward to put himself in reach of more of the defending capes.

Califade Perro used his massive spear to sweep a squadron out of the way before striking the ground, using the impact to throw himself back out of the way. He landed and straightened. He was shirtless, and had no doubt oiled his skin, though dust had collected on it, turning him a gray-bronze. He had bracers with fur tufts near the elbows, and a dog mask that covered the upper half of his face, extending a distance forward. The only other affectation he wore that made his outfit resemble a costume was the mount at his waist, too large to be a belt buckle, with a molded dog’s face jutting a rather generous handspan in front of him. He smiled, his teeth white and perfect, as the capes he’d batted aside climbed to their feet.

Apparently deeming that the circles weren’t working in this situation, Khonsu banished all three. Moord Nag’s shadow was freed, and rejoined the remainder of the mass. Khonsu’s forward advance was momentarily paused by the impact. He created the circles anew, placing them in spots where people at the epicenter couldn’t move fast enough to escape.

That was the moment I advanced.

“Weaver, how the fuck did you get to South America?” It was Tecton. “The Director is flipping out.”

“Someone gave me a ride. Chevalier will explain later.”

“You completely dropped off the radar for half an hour. We were convinced someone had come after you to take revenge for the work we’ve been doing cleaning up.”

“Not revenge. It doesn’t matter. I-” I stopped short as a fresh circle appeared. The placement, the timing… Legend had been caught.

“Weaver?”

Legend became a blur within the field. Then, in a matter of two or three seconds, the entire space filled with a red light. It slowly became white. Khonsu’s power apparently affected all of the space above the bubble, reaching into the stratosphere. It was like a pillar of light.

Eidolon created a forcefield, much like the one he’d fashioned to contain Phir Sē’s time bomb, only this one was open on one side, a ‘u’ shape with the opening facing Khonsu.

Khonsu seemed to notice, because he moved the column. It intersected Eidolon’s forcefield, and Khonsu’s power won out. The forcefield collapsed. This wouldn’t be an effect Eidolon could contain.

“I’m in the middle of something, Tecton. I’m wearing the same camera I had at the last fight, so ask for access to the feed, or get over here. We think we’ve got a way to pin him in place.”

“Right.”

Eidolon was shouting something I couldn’t make out. Alexandria joined the fray, fighting to keep Khonsu in place, pummeling the Endbringer, dodging the columns that closed in on her.

It was impossible to say exactly how he did it, but Eidolon managed to catch the light before it could turn the battlefield into a smoking ruin. It condensed into a ball, swinging around past Eidolon as if he were a planet and it was in orbit, and then flew into Khonsu and Alexandria with a slingshot turn.

It wasn’t a long, steady stream like the one in New Delhi had been. It was a white bullet sliding out in a heartbeat, cutting past Khonsu, Alexandria and a good mile of landscape, before driving into the ocean at the horizon’s edge. Steam billowed out explosively.

Eidolon crossed the battlefield in a flash, weaving to the left of one of the two remaining columns of altered time, the right of the next, and erected a wall to keep the steam from frying the flesh from our bones.

It couldn’t have been precognition that let him move that fast. Enhanced reflexes? Something else entirely?

And he’d been saying his power had been getting weaker.

Alexandria had been stripped of much of her costume, but she fought on without a trace of modesty. Legend, too, seemed unfazed, unaffected by however many years he’d spent in Khonsu’s trap.

And Khonsu, for his part, hadn’t suffered nearly as much as Behemoth had. Five or six layers had been stripped away, and what was left was glimmering with a light that danced around the outside of his body.

The hue and intensity of it matched the light at the edges of his time fields. It slowly faded.

I reached the battlefield proper, but lingered near the back, beyond the reach of the time fields. This wasn’t a scenario where I’d be on the offensive. At best, I was a helping hand. My bugs spread out over the area, and I was able to track the movements of the time fields, the combatants. I started drawing out the spools of silk I had on my costume, extending them between me and the various combatants, using the arms on my flight suit to manipulate them and ensure that neither I nor my threads got tangled up.

Spider silk extended between me and the various capes around me. These guys were South American. Three out of four would be in league with the various criminal factions and cartels. One in four were ‘heroes’. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. The cues and details in their costumes weren’t ones I was familiar with. The choices in color, style, attitude and more were too similar. A cultural gap I couldn’t wrap my head around, in any event.

Things were confused further by the fact that, by many accounts, the villains running or serving within the cartels were the ones sponsored by the government. The ‘heroes’, in turn, were rogue agents.

Califa de Perro, King of Dogs,howled and joined the fight, ready to capitalize on the success. In the same instant, I sensed my bugs being eliminated. Not dying, per se, but being eradicated from existence. The ones who’d been following after the column had been caught inside.

It hadn’t changed direction. It had stopped, in preparation for a change in direction. I didn’t even have to look to see Khonsu’s target. I caught an earring of the King of Dogs with my silk, tugged.

He stopped, yelping as he looked in my direction.

“Run!” my voice was no doubt lost in the cacophony. I tugged again.

He used his spear to move. A second later, the time field veered into the space he’d just occupied.

It was moving faster. A third circle appeared, and the movement had accelerated.

Sensing that Khonsu was about to beat a retreat, the Thanda made their move. A piece of rubble descended from the heavens, striking Khonsu with a force that knocked half of the defending capes off their feet, myself included.

Another of the Thanda used their power to anchor themselves to the rotating circles. They floated through the air, equidistant to the circle, effectively untouchable, waiting, watching.

When they reached a certain point in the rotation, they caught a small hill so it could join them, anchored to them as they were anchored to the circle. It swung into Khonsu like a wrecking ball.

The falling star, such as it was, had broken through more of the exterior. Not a lot, but some. As the dust cleared, I could see glimmers of light, dancing through the space beneath the injury.

It was the moment I realized that the motherfucker was reinforced. He had forcefields set between layers, so he couldn’t be wiped out in a matter of good hits like Behemoth had been. It was eerily reminiscent of Glory Girl.

Still, he was feeling the hurt. Moord Nag’s shadow ripped into the site of the injury, widening it, danced back as Khonsu swung one arm at the skull, clipping and shattering one antler, and then lunged again, driving itself into another injured area.

It caught Khonsu off-balance, and he landed on his back on the ground. The shadow flowed over him, the skull butting him in the face to knock him down once again as he tried to rise. It simultaneously extended out, reaching across the battlefield to push Moord Nag back out of the way of a swiftly approaching Khonsu-field. She stumbled a little as she was deposited a hundred feet back, but she didn’t really react. The shadow had more personality than she did, here.

Khonsu had apparently had enough, because he extended his hands out to either side, lying with his back to the ground.

The Thanda member who was rotating around the Endbringer reached out, and each and every one of the defending capes was swept up in his power, drifting counter-clockwise around the Endbringer. My feet lifted off the ground as he rose, and all of us rose with him.

The Endbringer teleported, and thanks to the Thanda, we were collectively teleported with it. My bugs, Moord Nag’s shadow, and several tinker-made mechanical soldiers were left behind, as we found ourselves on a beach riddled with stones the size of my fist. Silos bigger than most apartment buildings loomed just over the hill.

The fight resumed in heartbeats, capes closing the distance to fight the instant the Thanda deposited them on the ground.

I sighed and struck a key on the keyboard. The window with the video footage of the Khonsu fight closed down.

I let the phone ring twice more before I made myself check the screen. Tecton.

I wouldn’t pick up for most others, I thought. Hell, I’d have left the phone off if I didn’t fear that there’d be a critical call. I’d seen most of it anyways. I answered the phone.

“Weaver, where the fuck did you go?“

I smiled a little to myself. It was an eerie, amusing parallel to what he had said in the video, except he was a little more frayed, a little more weary with me.

“You know where I’m going,” I said. “So do the bosses.”

“We haven’t even- you’re going to screw this up for yourself. Why now?”

“It’s fine, Tecton,” I said.

“It’s not fine, it’s…”

“They don’t have to like it. I don’t think it matters if they don’t.”

He seemed to be lost for words at that.

I didn’t push the offensive. I’d been working on that in the therapy sessions, not treating social interactions like fights. Calm, patient, I dragged my finger down the side of the screen. The text scrolled down.

Tecton interrupted my scrolling, finally speaking. “I kind of hoped we’d gotten to the point where we were okay, that you’d trust me.”

“I trust you,” I said. “But-”

“But,” he said, echoing me as he cut me off. “Take a second and think about what you say next. Grace asked me to call because, I’d like to think, I’m a pretty calm, laid back guy. All things considered, anyways. But I’m on the verge of being pissed at you, and saying the wrong thing now will push this from me being angry in terms of something professional to me being pissed because of something personal.”

“I-”

“Think for a second before you talk, Taylor. You start talking right away and you’ll find your way to a really good argument, and I’ll concede this argument, this discussion, but it won’t get us any closer to a resolution.”

“Right,” I said. “Thinking.”

“I’ll be on the line.”

I mulled over his words. I was anxious on a number of levels. Terrified might be the better word. I stood on a precipice, and the meeting I was running the risk of missing was only part of it. I continued scrolling down as I thought, as if the individual entries could give structure to my thoughts.

Rio de Janeiro, August 15th, 2012 // Leviathan
Notes: Guerilla strike, mind games. Travels from site to strike Cape Town and Perth after faking retreats.
Target/Consequence: no target apparent.

I stopped at the entry that followed. I clicked it. The one for Bucharest.

The video box opened up, but it was dark, the camera covered by my hair at the outset. There was only audio.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” It was Grace.

“Are you hurt?” Tecton’s voice.

“Golem is. Shit.”

The image wobbled as the camera mounted on my mask did, and the me on the camera moved the hair aside, allowing the camera to record the video. The streets were empty, old stately buildings loomed close on all sides, my bugs crawling along the face of each of them.

There was a beep. The camera was mounted on the right side of my face, the armband on my left wrist, so the glimpse was fleeting. A yellow screen.

“Heads up!” the me behind the camera called out.

“For what!?” it was Annex responding, breathless. “Oh! Oh shit!”

It was only a second later that it became clear just why Annex was swearing. The city shifted. Roads narrowed, doors splintered and were virtually spat out of the frames as the door frames themselves narrowed.

The image on the camera veered. I’d seen the shift coming, and the bugs on the faces of the buildings let me know that the attack was coming a fraction of a second in advance. As buildings on either side of me lunged closer together by a scale of five or six feet each, spikes sprung from the elaborate architecture, from gargoyle’s mouths at either side of a short flight of stairs, from the sign that bore a store’s name, a blade rising from a manhole cover… ten or twelve spikes, for me alone, each fifteen or twenty feet long. They criss-crossed, came from every direction.

The camera had gone very still. Then, slowly, it moved again, examining the surroundings. Blades and prongs surrounded me, poised ready to prick and gouge like the thorns of a rosebush, all around me. My fingers rose to the camera’s view, wet with blood.

I’d only dodged as much as I had by virtue of the ability to sense where the bugs that clung to the blades were moving, and enough luck to be able to move into a space that escaped the various thrusts. The blood had been from a glancing blow, along the underside of my right breast. I traced it now, as I sat in front of the monitor, feeling the spot over where the scar would be. The fucking things were sharp enough to pierce my armor and silk both.

I could remember my outrage at that fact, the stupid, silly comment that had run through my mind, that I’d refused to say in fear that this video would somehow leak as well.

Can’t believe the blade hit such a small target.

“Everyone okay?” I asked, on the screen.

I listened to the various replies of confirmation. I followed by relating how the armor I’d made them wasn’t sure protection.

Then the camera’s view shifted as I freed myself of the spikes I’d so narrowly avoided –mostly avoided-. I took two steps forward, and then threw myself to the ground as a figure sprung from the wall, a woman, moving so fast she could barely be glimpsed. The camera veered again as I rolled on the ground, avoiding two blades that plunged from the underside of her ‘body’ to the ground, punching into the earth.

She had carried forward, uncaring that I’d dodged, slamming into another wall, and she had left a piece of herself in her wake. Or a piece of what she’d made herself out of, anyways. She’d become the city, and this small fraction of herself had been formed out of the light gray brick that formed the building to my right. She’d left the pillar behind, three feet across, barring my path.

My head whipped around as I followed her progress. One more of the rushing figures appeared a block down, two more behind me, simultaneous. A pillar, then a short wall and another pillar, respectively.

“Heroes, be advised,” Dragons A.I.’s voice came over the armband, “The Endbringer Bohu appears to follow a strict pattern. The city is condensed in twenty-four minute intervals, followed almost immediately by the miniature Endbringers producing barriers, walls, pillars, blocking apertures and more. The next phase, occurring gradually over the next ten minutes, will produce deadfalls, pitfalls and a smoothing of terrain features. Following that, we should expect more complex mechanical traps to appear, after which point the cycle will start anew. Be advised that she attacks with the spikes as she enters each phase. Disparities in reports suggest that she is feinting in some cases, feigning an inability to do so.”

There was a distant sound of something massive crumbling. I now knew it was Tecton, tearing through the area. I’d be using bugs to direct him to trapped citizens. I was avoiding the terrain features, he was simply plowing his way through them, doing maximum damage.

The image veered as I approached an archway the Endbringer had created. I paused before entering, circumvented it by going over, avoiding the traps I’d noted with my smallest bugs.

I could see her. Bohu. She was a tower, spearing into the sky, gaunt and stretched thin to the point where her head was five times longer than it was wide. Her body widened as it reached towards the ground, reached into it, extending roots and melding into the landscape. Her narrow eyes were like beacons, cutting through a cloud cover that was virtually racing towards the horizon in the gale-force winds. Her hair, in tendrils as thick around as my arm, shifted only slightly, heavy as stone, despite everything. She dwarfed the other Endbringers in scale, one thousand three hundred feet tall, and her body extended into the city. I couldn’t even guess at the radius she controlled.

Beside her was her sister, Tohu, who would have been almost imperceptible if it weren’t for the glow around her. Tohu, with three faces. Legend’s white and blue mask, Eidolon’s glowing shroud, and Kazikli Bey’s red helmet, each twisted to be feminine, framed by the long hair that wove and wound together to form her body. It condensed into cords and ribbons, and the ribbons and cords, in turn, condensed into her chest and lower body, two torsos made with overlapping versions of the hairstuff, small breasted, with only one pair of legs at the lower half. The colors were extensions of the costumes she was copying, predominantly white here, but with streaks of crimson, green and sky blue highlighting the ridges and edges.

Her four hands were long-fingered, claw-tipped extremities in shapes that served as mockeries of the people she was mimicking. Two of Eidolon’s hands with the blue-green glow around them were holding a forcefield up to protect her sister, while a white-gloved one focused on using Legend’s lasers to target capes who thought flying up and out of the city was a good idea. Not that it was easy to fly in winds like this. Not the sorts of winds that an aerokinetic like Kazikli Bey could make, capable of slicing someone with air compressed into razorlike ribbons. A hand in a red gauntlet was gesturing, redirecting the wind to blow down, across, and in crosswise currents that formed brief-lived whirlwinds.

The me in the video made a small sound as she took the brunt of that cutting wind, hopped down from the arch, entering the city once more. It was just now starting her third phase, the pitfalls and deadfalls, eliminating cover, cleaning up rubble, and slowly, painfully crushing anyone who had been trapped in either of the previous two phases. If crushing wasn’t possible, she would apparently settle for suffocation.

I closed down the video. There wasn’t anything more to hear in the exchange between the Wards, and it wasn’t a good memory.

Another counter to Scion. All too often, he was late to arrive, and once Tohu had chosen three faces and Bohu had claimed the battlefield, well, the fight was more or less over.

“I could hear,” Tecton said. “You were watching one of the Endbringer videos.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thoughts?”

“We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “I owe you a lot.”

“And we owe you in turn. We’re a team, Taylor. You have to recognize that. You know that. We’ve been together far, far longer than you were with the Undersiders.”

We’d participated in more than half of those fights. My eyes fell on the clock in the top right hand corner of the screen.

8:04am, June 19th, 2013

“Listen,” Tecton said. “I’m not demanding anything here. I just need a straight answer, so I know what to tell the others. If you say you’re not going to be here, that’s- I’ll understand. Except not really, but I’ll…”

He trailed off.

“You’ll accept it,” I said.

“I’m going to lie and say yes,” Tecton answered me.

I looked at the list of recent Endbringer fights, flicking my finger on the screen’s edge to scroll up, then down.

“I’ll be there at two,” I told him.

“You will?” He almost sounded surprised.

“We’ve been through too much, and you’re right. I can’t throw it all away.”

“I’m glad.”

“See you in a couple of hours,” I said.

“See you, Taylor. Have a happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” I said, hanging up.

Eighteen, I thought. I stood and stretched, swaying a little as the craft changed course. A two-fingered swipe on the screen showed the craft’s course and our ETA. Another two-fingered swipe returned me to my desktop.

C/D: Endbringer
28:18:44:34

C/D: End of the World
-16:21:56:50

Sixteen days late. The only person more freaked out than me was Golem.

I’d revised the countdown clock to assume that Jack Slash would appear on the date he’d set with Golem. June fourth was the deadline he’d given, for Theo to find him, to kill him, or the madman would kill a thousand people in some spectacular fashion, ending with Aster and Theo himself.

No appearance, no mass murders.

June twelfth was the date the Slaughterhouse Nine had left Brockton Bay. The day that was supposed to start the two year countdown.

It wasn’t supposed to be precise, but watching the clock tick with each second beyond the supposed deadline, knowing that something could be happening in a place I wasn’t aware of, the mere thought made my heartbeat quicken, an ugly feeling rise in my gut.

Dinah had confirmed to the PRT that things were still in motion, that it was imminent, but the idea was swiftly losing traction.

I’d heard people joke about it. PRT employees who had likened Dinah to the evangelical preachers who promised an endtime, then scrabbled to make up excuses when the date in question passed.

My bugs could sense the insects within the city as the craft descended. Sand billowed in dramatic clouds the Dragonfly settled on the beach.

It wasn’t my ship, but the name was a joke, due to the degree Dragon had been sending me this way and that. Defiant was busy now, so it was mostly her doing the chaperoning, when the Protectorate couldn’t oblige.

The ramp finished descending, and I stepped down onto the beach, feeling the sand shift beneath the soft soles of my costumed feet. I could have flown or floated, but then I wouldn’t have felt like I was truly here.

I ascended a set of wooden stairs to rise from the beach to the street proper, joining the scattered residents who lived here. Men and women on their way to work, starting their day, children on their way to school, many in their Immaculata school uniforms.

I walked, taking it in. The smells, the feel, even the subtleties in pace and general atmosphere, they were familiar, comfortable.

Not good, but they were things I associated with home.

It was an unfamiliar area, but I had studied the satellite maps. I no longer wore my tracking device, but the PRT no doubt knew exactly where I was, for just that reason. If they couldn’t monitor the Dragonfly’s location, they would have found it on my computer.

I could see additions in the distance, the white tower that speared into the sky, the blocky, windowless structure that contained the scar. It wasn’t visible, but I knew I could make my way to the crater and see how they’d drawn up a border around it, done construction work underground to contain the contents and keep the water from eating away at the city infrastructure. I’d read up some on changes in Brockton Bay, had heard more from my dad in our regular visits.

Here, the area was marked with graffiti, always in the same variants, no two pieces alike. Devils, castles, angels, hearts. I suspected the arrangements and combinations meant something. The buildings here were new, quaint, the layout intuitive.

And in the midst of it, they’d wedged in space for an addition. It made for a break in the flow of the footpaths. It forced an abrupt turn, a hesitation as you tried to work out the way to your destination. Accord had drawn out the city plans, and the Undersiders had altered it to make room for this. For a marking.

It fit, somehow, the way it broke the rhythm, the way it didn’t really jibe.

The fact, I thought with a slight smile, that it irritated.

Two masks, resting against one another, one almost resting inside the other. One laughing, the other not frowning, but the expression blank. They were cast in bronze, set on a broad pedestal, four feet high.

I approached, my eyes falling on the objects that had been placed on the pedestal. Wedding rings, a weather-beaten gold that didn’t match the bronze. Twenty, thirty. I might have obtained an exact count, but I didn’t want to dirty it with my bugs.

I turned, looking around, and saw how the buildings surrounding the edifice were marked with graffiti. Castles and landscapes with blue sky above.

“I thought I’d see you first, Regent,” I said. “A kind of apology, for not coming sooner. For not being there at the funeral, if there was one.”

The empty eyeholes of the solemn mask stared down at me.

“I’ve thought about a lot of things in the time I’ve been gone. Framing stuff, stepping back to consider just how fucked up it was that I was spending time with you, condoning what you’d done. You took over small-time gang lords, I know. Took over Imp, even. So why did I let it happen?”

The wind blew my hair across my face. I noticed that there were people staring, looking at me from the other side of the street. Whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.

“Then I think about how you went out, and I think… you know, it doesn’t balance out. One selfless deed, after all the shit you did? No. But that’s your cross to bear, not mine. I don’t believe in an afterlife or anything like that, but, well, I guess that’s the mark you left. When we die, all that’s left are the memories, the place we take in people’s hearts.”

I reached out to touch one of the wedding rings. It was partially melted into the surface of the edifice. I imagined someone could strike it free with a hammer.

Not that I would do that.

“Sounds so corny when I say that, but it’s how I have to frame this, you know? You lived the life you did, with a lot of bad, a little bit of horrific, and some good, and now you’re gone, and people will remember different parts of that. And I think that would sound arrogant, except, well, we’re pretty similar on that score, aren’t we? It’s where we sort of had common ground, that I didn’t have with any of the others. We’ve been monstrous.”

I let my finger trace the edge of the wedding ring.

“I’ve hurt people for touching those.” The voice sounded just behind me, in my ear. I jumped, despite the promises to myself that I wouldn’t.

Then again, she wasn’t someone you could anticipate.

“Imp,” I said.

I turned around to look at her.

She’d been attractive in that dangerous too-much-for-her-age way before, and to judge by her body alone, she’d grown fully into it. She was statuesque, wearing the same costume I’d given her two years ago, when she’d been shorter. A quick glance suggested she’d cut off portions to adjust, wearing high boots and elbow length gloves to cover the gap, and wore a cowl to cover the gaps in the shoulders and neck. It might have looked terrible, but it fit. Her mask was the same as it had been, gray, noseless, long, disappearing into the folds of the cowl as the fabric sat around the lower half of her face, with only hints of teeth at the sides marking the mouth. The eyes were angled, with black lenses, curved horns arching over her straightened black hair.

“Tattletale said you’d be back today.”

“I figured she’d know,” I said.

“Was it worth it? Leaving?”

I hesitated. “Yes.”

I hesitated, I thought.

“I told the others. They’re on their way.”

“Okay,” I answered. Fast response.

No. Too fast. I reached out with bugs, and I sensed the crowd, the way they were standing.

Here and there, there were people who shouldn’t have been paying attention to the scene. A young girl inside one of the buildings with the graffiti-mural on the exterior, holding a baby. A boy was standing a little too far away to see, but he didn’t approach to get a better view.

There were a small handful of others.

I looked at the rings on the memorial. “Heartbreaker’s.”

“He collected them. I uncollected them.”

“I’d heard he died.”

Imp nodded slowly. “Said I would. I told you I’d kill his dad for him.”

An admission. I felt a kind of disappointment mingled with relief. Not a set of feelings I wanted to explore. I suspected the sense of relief would disappear under any kind of scrutiny.

“People keep prying them loose, but there’s usually someone nearby to keep an eye out and get a photo or description. I track them down and bring the rings back. Once every few months, anyways. Kind of a pain.”

“It’s how he would want to be remembered, I think,” I said.

“Yeah.”

No snark, no humor? I wondered how much of that had been a reflection of her friendship and almost-romance with Regent.

“And you recruited the kids,” I said. I used my bugs to track the bystanders, my eyes to note more who fit the criteria. Boys and girls, some narrow in physique, most with black curls, others with that pretty set of features that had marked Regent and Cherish. Some were fit on all counts, others mingled two of the qualities and skipped a third. Heartbreaker’s offspring, unmistakably.

“I recruited some. They needed a place to go, and it’s kind of nice, having them around,” Imp said. “They’re good enough at fending for themselves. One or two, you get the feeling they’re almost like him. In a good way.”

“I’m glad,” I replied. Glad on more counts than I’m willing to say.

Then, as I realized that any number of those kids might have taken after their father in the powers department, I was struck by the thought that they might know that, that they might report that relief I was experiencing back to their de-facto leader.

If that was the case, they would also report the way I felt ill at ease, just a little creeped out, as I eyed Imp’s followers.

Imp was eyeing me. I cocked my head a little, the best expression I could give without taking off my mask, hoping it conveyed curiosity.

“I like you better than her,” Imp said.

Like me better than who? I wondered. Than Lisa? Rachel? I didn’t get a chance to ask. I was distracted as I sensed an approach and turned to look.

“Bitch is here,” Imp said, noting the turn of my head and the figure at the end of the street, ignoring traffic as her dogs made their way to us.

Rachel, I thought.

“She’s been going to the fights, helping out here when we send for her. I haven’t been going to the fights, so I dunno how much you’ve seen her there. She’s been checking in on me, wandering around here with her dogs and scaring the everloving shit out of people until I come to say hi, then she leaves for another few weeks. I’ve probably seen her the most.”

“I’ve barely seen her at all,” I said. Even with the Endbringer attacks.

The dogs weren’t running, and it took me a moment to realize why. There was one dog that was larger than the rest, with half of a bison’s skull strapped over the left side of its face, the horn arching out to one side. Armor and bones had been strapped on elsewhere. It didn’t seem like something Rachel would have done, dressing up her dog. One of her underlings?

It’s Angelica, I realized. The dog lumbered forward, moving at a good clip, but certainly not the speed the dogs were capable of when they went all-out. Rachel was controlling the speed of the other dogs to allow the wounded animal to keep up.

She was riding Bastard, I recognized. It was different from the others, symmetrical, the alterations flowing into each other better. Two other dogs accompanied her. Bentley wasn’t among them.

The onlooking crowd, Imp’s underlings included, sort of hurried on their way as the dogs approached Regent’s monument. Rachel hopped down as they reached our side of the street.

Rachel was taller, I noted, browned by sun, the jacket I’d given her tied around her waist, a t-shirt and jeans, with calloused feet instead of shoes or boots. Her auburn hair, it seemed, hadn’t been cut in the two years since I’d seen her. Here and there, hair twisted up and out of the veritable mane of hair, no doubt where tangled bits had been cut away. Only a sliver of her face and one eye were really visible through the hair, a heavy brow, an eye that seemed lighter in contrast to the darkened skin.

And damn, I thought, she’d put on muscle. I’d gained some, working out every day, but even with her frame and her natural inclination towards fitness, I suspected she must have been working hard, all day, every day. Maybe not quite what a man might have accomplished, but close.

“Rachel,” I said. I was overly conscious of how we’d parted, of the way I’d left the group and the awkward conversation during the New Delhi fight. “Listen-”

She wrapped me in a hug, her arms folding around me.

I was so caught off guard that I didn’t know how to respond. I put my arms around her in return.

She smelled like wet dog and sweat, and like pine needles and fresh air. It was enough that I knew the new environment had been good to her.

“They told me to,” she said, breaking the hug.

They wouldn’t be the Undersiders, I gathered. Her people, then.

“You didn’t have to, but it’s… it was a nice welcome,” I said.

“Didn’t know what to say, so they told me to just do. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I asked and they told me to hug you if I wanted to hug you and hit you if I wanted to hit you. Yeah.”

I’m guessing she only just decided, I thought. I’d been gambling by wearing my Weaver costume, but then, I hadn’t expected them to converge on me like this. I would have changed before seeing Rachel.

“It’s good?” I asked. “Over there?”

“They’re building, it’s annoying to get in and out. But its good. Tattletale made us bathrooms. We’ve been building the cabins around them.”

“Bathrooms are good,” I responded.

She nodded agreement, as if I hadn’t just said something awkward and lame.

“I remember you complaining about the lack in your letter,” I added.

“Yeah,” she said.

Wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, to carry on a conversation with her.

“Others are checkpointing in,” Imp said. “Just to give you a heads up.”

“Checkpointing?”

“Teleporting, kinda. Limited. Um. We’ve only got a second, but you should know in advance that they’re married.”

“Who?”

But Imp didn’t respond.

Foil and Parian appeared in a nearby building, the same building the girl with the baby was watching from. Two others had arrived with them.

Them? I wondered, mildly surprised. Then again, it made sense.

They approached, holding hands, and a bear managed to form itself from the roll of cloth Parian had bound to her back, without anyone, the stuffed creature included, really breaking stride. They’d barely changed, but for a little more height. Foil carried the crossbow that the PRT was apparently maintaining for her, and Parian had donned less dark colors, though the hair remained black.

The two capes with them each wore red gloves as part of their costume. I knew who they were from the stuff on the forums. The Red Hands. The alliance had gone through, apparently.

“So. You draw me over to the dark side, and then you flip,” Parian commented.

“I hope it’s working out,” I said.

She shrugged. “It isn’t not working out.”

“We’re fine,” Foil said. “I suppose I should thank you. If you hadn’t left, I don’t think I could’ve come.”

“You may be the only person to thank me for leaving,” I said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Imp added.

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

Tattletale arrived next. Grue appeared at the location with more Red Hands as she stepped outside. Where the others had been modest, approaching with a kind of leisure, she almost skipped for the last leg of the approach. She hugged me briefly, then kissed me on the cheeks. The mandibles, really, where the armor framed my jaw. Whatever.

Of everyone, I was least surprised at the changes with her. Her hair had been cut shorter, and she wore a mask that covered the entire upper half of her face, coming to a point at the nose. Her shoulders, elbows and knees had small shoulderpads on them, and there was a definition to the horizontal and vertical lines of black that marked her lavender costume. She wore a laser pistol at her hip, which bounced against her leg as she ran. PRT issue. Extremely illegal to own.

“It’s kind of hard to reply to it without drawing attention,” I said. “You don’t know how much I wanted the details on what’s being going on here.”

“Jerk,” she said, but she smiled. “But I should warn you-”

She didn’t get a chance to finish before I saw.

Grue approached. Of everyone, he was the least changed. Physically, anyways.

But the Red Hands walked in formation around him, and one, a young woman, walked in step with him, close enough that their arms touched. They could have held hands and it would have been just as blatant.

I’d faced Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine, I’d taken down who knew how many bad guys… and I had no idea how to face this.

He’d moved on, and I was glad he’d moved on. He maybe needed someone to lean on, to give him emotional support, and maybe she was that. I told myself that, I tried to believe it, but I was jealous and hurt and bewildered and…

And I bit back the emotion, approaching, ready to hug.

When he extended a hand for me to shake, I had to fight twice as hard to suppress any reaction to the hurt. I could tell myself that he’d at least done it before I’d raised my arms to hug him, but… yeah.

I took his hand and shook it. Then, on impulse, I pulled on it, drawing him forward and down a little, and put my other arm around his shoulders. Half of a hug, half a shake.

I eyed the young woman. She was a rogue, in the dashing villain sense, wearing a mask around the eyes, and old-fashioned clothes with lace around her ample cleavage. Her jacket and slacks were festooned with belts, bearing utility pouches and knives. The glove that wasn’t red had a knife attached to each fingertip, a brace around it to keep everything in place.

She met my own gaze with one of her own, a narrow, hard look.

“Oh. Skit- Taylor, meet Cozen. Second in command to the Red Hand.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. They don’t really match.

“Pleasure’s mine,” she said. “I’m meeting a legend, after all.”

Awkwardness followed.

And in the midst of that, Imp’s statements finally caught up with me.

I like you better than her.

Don’t be so sure, Imp had said. Well, Cozen would be happy I’d left.

Then, with a realization like a dash of cold water to the face, I remembered.

They’re married.

“Taylor,” Tattletale said, rescuing me before I could say something dumb. She hooked her arm around mine and led me around and away. “Much to talk about.”

“The end of the world,” I said. “Endbringers. Finding Jack, or the designer-”

“I’m sure,” I said. I almost wished my original plan had gone ahead, that I could have a really short visit with Grue, a longer sit with Rachel and her dogs, then a long discussion with Tattletale about what was going on, before I headed off to see my mom’s grave and my dad.

“Come on. We’ll walk, see the sights,” Tattletale said. “figure out what to do for breakfast or brunch.”

“Okay,” I said. I glanced at the others. Would they be down, or would they back out? Parian and Foil weren’t close to me, but they were sticking around. Cozen wasn’t making an excuse and leaving, and neither was Grue. I could see him exchanging murmured words with her.

I must have looked a little too long at him, because Imp fell in step beside me.

I glanced at her.

“I was just fucking with you,” she whispered. “I thought you probably deserved it.”

My stomach did a flip flop at that. Anger, relief, bewilderment, more anger. Still more anger.

“Man, the way your bugs reacted. Hilarious. You act like you’re all stoic, but then I just have to look over there and over there and I see bees and butterflies circling around like eagles ready to dive for the kill.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but she cut me off.

“She is pregnant,” Imp said.

My mouth shut.

“Kidding. This is fun. Come on, butterflies, I see you over there. Do your worst, I know you want to kill me.”

I considered jabbing her with my taser, and the thought was vivid enough that I imagined it buzzing at my hip.

Except it wasn’t my taser. It was my phone.

As it had so often this past month, I felt my heart leap into my throat, that pang of alarm. A very different kind of alarm than Imp had been provoking from me. More real, more stark.

I drew the phone from my belt, then stared down at the text that was displayed. A message from Defiant.

“Endbringer?” Rachel asked. Something in my body language must have tipped her off.

I shook my head, but I said, “Yes. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“An endbringer with a lowercase ‘e’,” I said. “It looks like Jack may have made his challenge to Theo. It’s starting.”

“You’re attempting to reach Glenn Chambers, co-president of Faceti. For our mutual convenience, please categorize your message. Press one to contact my personal assistant, who can get your message to me in text asap. Press two if you got my number from my business card. Press four if you are an employee. Press five if this is a personal call. Press nine if the call is of utmost urgency, to put yourself on the line immediately if I’m on the phone, or set off an alarm if I’m not.”

I seriously debated pressing nine. I felt like this was a nine.

I hit one instead.

“This is James, receiving a call for Mr. Chambers.”

“It’s Weaver, I… I don’t know who else to call.”

I wasn’t coherent, which was unusual, considering how I could normally keep myself together in a crisis.

“Oh, Weaver! He’s actually talking to someone about you right now. I got his attention. He’ll be with you in a second.”

“I’m not sure I have a second,” I said. There was no response. He wasn’t on the line.

“Oh man,” Golem said. “I’m… oh fuck.”

Quite possibly the only person who was as concerned as I was.

“Glenn here. You should have called earlier.”

“I didn’t get a chance,” I said. I would have explained, but time was precious here.

“Their timing is off. I would have done this differently if I were your enemy. It’s too much of a gamble as it stands.”

“They planned this, have been setting it up for a while. I expected interference with the missions, being supplanted with the Protectorate squad, not this. I just need to know-”

There was a fanfare, musical, light and jazzy. By the time it faded, a crowd I couldn’t see had started applauding.

“It’s starting,” Tecton said. He was a pillar of confidence here.

Glenn was talking, but I couldn’t hear over Tecton and the crowd. I stepped away, my free hand raised to block out the noise.

“…nds like the show just started. They have to have leverage against you if they’re pulling this. Your probation?”

“They’re threatening to declare a breach if I don’t play along.”

“Play along. I heard what you did, announcing what the PRT was doing to the entire building. Word got around, in certain channels. Do not do that again. Don’t call your bosses out and let people know that you don’t want to be here. They’ll be ready for it, and you’ll hurt worse than they do.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Did they prep you?”

“No. I got off a six-hour graveyard patrol with Gauss and returned to the base to hear about this. They even put our new Protectorate member on the comms to keep me out of the loop, then fed me just enough information I had to listen without telling me enough. I’ve never even seen this show, and I barely had time to get my costume brushed off and my hair in order. They tidied it up some here, but-”

Glenn cut me off. “Okay. It’s not the end of the world, but I don’t think this show will help you. These shows almost always result in a ratings dip over time. It boosts your appeal but hits you on respectability. It’s only worth it if there’smerchandise or media to sell, which there isn’t. They’re tanking you. Still, this is minor in the grand scheme of things.”

Being in front of millions of people was minor. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had appearances before, but most had been without my knowledge. The unveiling of ‘Weaver’ was a good example of how tongue-tied I was liable to get.

“What do I do? How do I approach this?”

“I’d tell you to just be yourself, but that’s a terrible idea. Be yourself as you normally are with the Wards. Be the teenager, the friend. Play up the fact that you’re a group, that there’s camaraderie. Build a relationship with the audience by sharing things they probably don’t know. Nothing sensitive.”

I wondered if the dildo prank that the Wards had initiated me with would qualify as sensitive.

More than that, I wondered if I even had enough of a bond with the others, something I could draw on.

“Be engaging. It’s more important to keep the conversation moving than it is to say what you want to say.”

“Wards!” A woman called out. “All together. Hurry up now. You’re on in two minutes.”

Like a kindergarten teacher herding students around.

“Two minutes,” I said. “I should go.”

“Good luck. This is a day the strategist needs to take a vacation, understand? Or delegate a task to it. They’re putting you out there because they think you’ll either take a hit to your reputation or you’ll try to be clever and self destruct. You stand to lose more than they do, and this isn’t live, meaning they can pull anything they don’t want on the air.”

I joined the others, my heart was pounding with enough force that the thumps rocked my entire body. Tecton was closest to the stage, followed by Grace and Wanton. The core team members, the veterans. Veterans in one sense. Wanton didn’t have half the field experience I did, even with our sustained campaign against the local villains, starting to help out in Detroit and trying to deal with that one jerkass in Milwaukee who we hadn’t yet managed to pin down. Tecton and Grace were a little more seasoned, but not by a lot.

The stage manager was checking the microphones everybody wore. She paused by me, and ensured it was plugged in, and that the connection was unbroken. I was essentially wearing the same costume I had in the winter, but had skipped the extra layer beneath. I suddenly felt intensely conscious of every wrinkle and all of the grit that had gathered up around my ankles and feet as I’d patrolled.

The costumes the others wore were immaculate. Wanton had styled his hair to be messy in a good way, and was draped in flowing, dark blue clothing with lighter armor situated across his chest, his waist, his boots and along the length of his arms. I suspected that the cloth afforded him more protection than the thin plates of metal, but it served to mask his artificial arm.

Grace’s costume was light, in contrast to the dark of Wanton’s. Her new costume was white cloth, almost a martial artist’s outfit, but designed to offer more coverage. Reinforced pads were situated at every striking point, complete with studs to offer more traction and focused impacts. There wasn’t a single hair out of place beneath her combination headband, hairband and mask. She had glossy, wavy locks I was a little jealous of, and a trace of lipstick.

I wish I’d considered some make up. Not that I wore a lot, or that I’d had the time. I had only what they’d given me in the studio, and they hadn’t gone overboard, on the assumption that I’d keep my mask on. No, if anything it forced me to keep it on. Heavy eyeshadow to make it easier to see my eyes behind the blue lenses.

Cuff seemed to be in the same department as Grace. She’d done herself up, with a more ornate braid to her hair, and had altered her costume a fraction, to allow for more decorative tailoring at the ends of each panel and the nose of her visor. Slivers of skin were visible between some slats of armor at the upper arms and collarbone. Of everyone here, she seemed the most excited. She couldn’t sit still, but she was smiling, and it was a genuine expression.

That left Annex and Golem. Golem was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t blame him. Like me, he had details he’d want to hide. His family, his background, the fact that he was in foster care. His costume, too, was a work in progress. It was a resource for him, and maximizing that resource often set him back in the appearance department. Annex, by contrast, had settled into a ‘look’. It was plain, intentionally so. The white cloak was form-fitting, with ribs to keep the fabric straight and close to his body so it was easier and quicker to absorb.

“Grace,” Tecton said. “No swearing.”

Wanton snickered a little.

Tecton pitched his voice lower. “Golem? You’ve got to stop calling adults sir while you’re in costume. You do it as a civilian, dead giveaway. Hasn’t mattered up until now, but this is the test.”

“Weaver…” Tecton said. He gave me a look, with only his eyes visible behind his helmet. “…I don’t even know. But I’ve kind of gone the extra mile for you, and you’ve done a lot in return, but-”

The stage manager stooped down a little to talk to us, even though both Tecton and I were both taller than her. “Alrighty, guys! You’re on in five, four…”

“I still owe you one. I’ll be good,” I told Tecton, just under my breath.

“One!”

The jazzy fanfare played. As if that wasn’t cue enough, the stage manager gave us a little prod, literally pushing Tecton forward.

It was surprising how small the studio was, both the stage with its slate gray floor and fake cityscape behind it and the studio audience. Tecton led the way to the half-circle of a table with the three hosts on the far side. The largest chair closest to the hosts was undoubtedly his, shipped here by the PRT so he could sit down in his armor without crashing to the floor.

We sat down. Tecton, Grace, Wanton, me, Annex, Cuff and Golem, in that order. The music died as we took our seats, opposite the three hosts. An adult man, African-American by the looks of it, a woman with peroxide blond hair and a girl who could have been her daughter, a brunette who bordered on overweight, with a winning smile and an overly generous chest.

“Welcome back to Mornings with O, J and Koffi,” the woman said. “School’s out for the day and we’ve got the Chicago Wards here for breakfast. Good morning, guys.”

We voiced our replies. Wanton gave me a look, smiling, and I made myself smile as well.

The young girl gave a small wave, “So nice to meet you. We had the team here before, but you guys have definitely changed things up since. Campanile was the team leader then.”

“Campanile graduated to the Protectorate a little while ago,” Tecton said. “He said to say hi.”

“We had a giant Japanese crab on the show just a month ago, I think. Jo had to leave the stage,” Koffi said. “I think she’s a little nervous with Weaver here.”

“That was so embarrassing,” the young woman said. I made a mental note of her being ‘Jo’. “And you’re never going to let me live it down.”

More laughter.

Oh hell, I thought. It was all so fake. Fake responses, fake conversation. The personalities, the way they were over-talking, it was like they’d taken everything that irritated me and condensed it into this, and situated it all in front of countless viewers so I couldn’t even respond the way I wanted to.

“Thank you. Good,” I said. Then, in an attempt to recover the clumsy sentence, I added, “I’m glad.”

The blonde, who was ‘O’ by the process of elimination, said, “There’s been a fair bit of attention directed at your team. The leaked video thrust you all into the spotlight. Then you dropped off the radar.”

“Recuperating,” Tecton said. “We’re teenagers. We go to school and play video games and being a cape is only part of it.”

“Except for Weaver,” Wanton said.

Both Tecton and I shot him a look, and then I remembered that there were eyes on me. There was a reaction from the audience. Light laughter.

“What do you mean?” Jo asked.

How could I even explain that I was working towards stopping or mitigating the degree of the world ending, when I wasn’t allowed to mention the fact? Or that we were systematically targeting the most problematic villains, when I didn’t want anyone to see the show and hear the battle plan outlined for them?

“Wanton has been poking fun at Weaver about how she doesn’t go out or maintain any hobbies,” Tecton explained. “Which isn’t entirely fair. My apologies to Weaver bringing this up, but it’s not a secret thatshe’s on house arrest. She’s on probation, and so she’s limited in what she can do.”

Koffi seized on the topic. “You had a pretty colorful life as a villain, Weaver. We’ve seen the cell phone video of you in the cafeteria of your high school, opposite Dragon and Defiant.”

I felt simultaneously glad that the conversation was moving and horrified that I was the subject. I blamed Wanton.

Still, I said, “Clockblocker too. I wasn’t actually attending school, though. It was a couple of unlucky circumstances that put me there, and… yeah. At that point in time, I’d wanted to focus on taking care of my part of the city.”

“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” O asked. “You were a criminal overlord. How were you even qualified for that?”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. I was more nervous now, half-convinced I was damning myself further with every sentence. I’d inevitably come off too harsh and ‘dark’ for the civilians who were watching and too soft for any villains who happened to see. Damn it. “Taking the territory and being a villain were independent things. Related, but different. It was after Leviathan attacked, food, water, shelter and safety were hard to come by. It was a way to help. If I’d been a solo hero then, I’d have done much the same thing. I’d have been gentler, but yeah.”

With less money to spend, I thought. I’d avoided mentioning I was an undercover, aspiring hero when I’d started out. That had never worked out for me, and only complicated things.

“And Alexandria? I think everyone’s curious about your thoughts there. You were shocked, in the video, when she made a reappearance.”

I shook my head. “It’s not her. I’m… I’m not happy, obviously, to see her up there. It’s an ugly reminder of what happened. But to have another person fighting Endbringers? I’m okay with that part of it.”

“A long, bumpy road, and it’s brought you here,” O said.

“With the Chicago Wards,” I said, in a vain hope to turn the conversation away from me.

She took my cue. “New costumes, a new group. Behemoth is defeated and it looks like the Endbringers might have reverted to the schedule they had pre-2002. An attack every four to five months.”

The response caught me off guard. Was he lying for the sake of appearances or was it honest? How could someone be excited when the end of the world was nigh? Did he not believe it was coming?

Whatever the answer was, I felt oddly disappointed in him.

Cuff shifted in her seat, and metal scraped against the metal of the chair’s footrest with a high-pitched noise. She whispered, “Sorry.”

O leaned forward. “It’s fine. Let’s hear from some of the others. Wanton, your thoughts? Are the changes good?”

“The changes are good. I give Weaver a hard time, but she really kept us alive.”

“She did, by the looks of what happened in that video,” O said.

Bringing the conversation back to me. Again.

“Grace?” she asked. “Thoughts on your team member?”

“If you told me way back on the first time we met that I’d come to respect her, I’d have been surprised.”

Jo looked at me. “Does that bother you?”

“No. I respected and liked the Chicago Wards right off the bat, but I don’t blame them if there was any suspicion,” I said.

“Pretty generous.”

“If anything, I was pretty amazed by how they all pulled together in New Delhi. Three of them were new, two hadn’t even been in a real fight before, and they went up against Behemoth?”

Cuff was perched on the edge of her seat, doing her best not to move and make things squeak again. She had the ability to liquefy the metal touching her skin, which would have eliminated the problem, but the act would have ruined the look of it. Part of that stiffness was anticipation, like a child who hadn’t done their homework, sitting at their desk and dreading the moment where the teacher called on them. A stark contrast to her excitement earlier. Had the screech knocked her off cloud nine?

“Cuff,” Koffi said. “What do you think? We saw the video, and you were pretty scared at the start, there.”

“Terrified.”

“You got injured? We didn’t get to hear how.”

“A burn,” Cuff said, smiling a little. “I recuperated in a few days.”

A lie. She still hadn’t fully recuperated today, eight months after the fact. She might never.

“I love to ask this question,” Jo said. “What’s it like, being a superhero?”

She loved that question?

“It feels weird to think of myself as a hero,” Cuff said. “I’m… I don’t think I’ll ever be one of the big heroes. I’m not a cape at heart. Fighting isn’t in my personality, and I got powers like this.”

“Cuff is a girly-girl,” Wanton commented. “Her bunk at the Wards headquarters has pink sheets and rainbows and there’s a unicorn picture on the-”

Cuff leaned around me to mock-punch him. “I’m not that bad!”

“You’re bad, though.”

Tecton raised a hand to cover Wanton’s mouth. “I’m thrilled to have her on the team. She hasn’t disappointed me yet.”

Cuff smiled at him. “Thank you.”

I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to say the same about Cuff, but my standards might have been higher. She’d always done the job, but there was a reticence to her that wasn’t going away. Three months ago, in our first real conflict outside of fighting Behemoth, she’d needed a push to carry out an offensive. Four days ago, in Milwaukee, she’d needed that same coaxing.

Cuff was competent. She had her strengths, and was stellar in some narrow cases. At the same time, I still worried if a moment’s hesitation on her part would get one of us hurt somewhere down the road.

She was talking, happy to be in the limelight, stage fright forgotten. “I was saying what it’s like being a hero. It’s overwhelming. It’s something that eats into every part of your life even if you want to limit it to four hours a day, four times a week. If you don’t train and exercise then you fall behind. If you don’t read the briefings on the bad guys, then you look stupid when you do run into them and have to ask someone.”

“Um,” Cuff said. Stage fright back in full force. She’d touched on something that would get her a slap on the hand from the PRT, and now she didn’t have her footing.

I was trying to think of a way to rescue her when Tecton said, “Fights happen. We’re actively trying to avoid direct confrontation, but we patrol and we practice our abilities so we can handle ourselves in the real crisis situations. Many of our members patrol with other capes so they can get experience while having someone to rely on in case of an emergency.”

All true, but he was omitting the fact that we were actively seeking out indirect confrontation. It was an admirable spot of double-speak, simultaneously reinforcing the atmosphere we were hoping to establish. Heroes are safe. Everything is under control.

“I kind of like those times,” Annex said. “You get to hang out with the local powerhouses, hear what they have to say, learn from them. I had a brief stay in a few other teams, but the one thing I really like about Chicago is that everyone is okay with me asking questions, and I have a lot.”

“Who’s your favorite cape to hang out with?” Jo asked.

“Shuffle. Our powers work well together, if we’re careful not to let them interfere.”

“And Golem? I can almost guess. When Campanile appeared in the evening news, he had some promising words to say about the Protectorate’s newest member. When we asked him who the most promising new recruit in the Wards was, he named you.”

“Ah,” Golem said. “Yeah.”

“Do you think you can live up to that?”

“I hope I can,” Golem said.

The conversation was faltering. I thought of what Glenn had said. Showing some of the bonds between team members. If I had one with anyone, it was with Golem. The running, the shared perspective on the end of the world, the fact that we were both Brockton Bay natives…

“Everything Tecton has been saying about Cuff is true for Golem,” I said. “If he’s getting praise from the heroes, he deserves it. He’s a classic hero at heart.”

“I like how I’m omitted from that list,” Wanton said. “Only person who hasn’t been praised so far.”

“I think you’re awesome,” Jo said, smiling. The audience cooed.

“Golem’s steadfast,” I said. “He’s working out, he’s studying hard for both regular school and cape stuff. And with all of that going on, he’s still generous enough to help me out with my stuff. Like Tecton said, I’m limited in where I can go and when, and Golem helps with that.”

The running, primarily, but not wholly that. He’d walked with me to the mall once or twice. I didn’t want to share details, though, in case people decided to try to find us while we were out, with Golem not in costume.

“And this is the third time you’ve turned the conversation awkwardly back to me,” I retorted.

He gave me a sheepish grin.

“A tender moment on the battlefield,” O said. “I think a lot of people were surprised.”

It was a personal moment, I thought. If I harbored any ill will towards Glenn, it was for that. He’d deleted sound or video where it gave up identifying details, like the nature of Cuff’s injury. He hadn’t erased the scene with the woman in the suit, but the reception hadn’t held up that deep underground, so there was no need. He’d also been kind enough to erase the scene where Imp had promised to get revenge on Heartbreaker. The villain hadn’t been notified of her plan.

But all of the bonding, the closeness, leaving interactions with Rachel open for hundreds of millions of people to speculate on? That was scummy.

Necessary on a level, but still scummy.

I hadn’t replied to his statement. I almost wanted to let the silence linger awkwardly, just to nettle them and drive home that it wasn’t their business.

Jo didn’t give me the chance. “You talked about Tecton and Golem as naturally heroic people. What about you?”

Man, her questions irritated me. Asking questions where they already knew the answer or where the answer was so immaterial… Who watched this kind of garbage?

Why was I being forced to support it by my presence?

“I was a villain for three months,” I said. “Maybe I’d like to think I was a little bit heroic as a villain, and I’m a little bit villainous as a hero. But I’m working on that last part.”

“Hold on, hold on. You think you were heroic, before you switched sides?” Koffi asked. “By all accounts, you killed Alexandria and a law enforcement official. You were quoted as talking to schoolchildren about the huge quantities of money you earned from criminal activities.”

Was he just sitting back, waiting for an opening?

Grace stepped up to my defense. “She said a little. She fought the Slaughterhouse Nine. She helped the people in her district.”

“That actually sounds impressive,” Jo said. “If that’s a little, then I wonder what being a little bit of a villain nowadays is like.”

She tittered along with the audience’s reaction.

“No response?” Koffi asked.

They were ganging up on me. I wished I knew who these guys were, what their normal style was, so I could roll with it.

“I’ll let my actions speak for themselves,” I said.

Tecton was quick to speak, backing me up. “I think that’s the best way to go about it. It’s untreaded ground, in a way, to have a notorious ex-villain on the team. Whatever happens, people are going to wonder where she stands, if I’ve been corrupted by association, or if this is all some elaborate scheme. But we can work on it. She can keep doing good work, and hopefully a few months or years down the road, I’ll still be able to say that Weaver’s a good person at heart and she’s done a lot for the good of the city and the world, you know? Some people won’t be convinced no matter what she does, but time and reliability should let Weaver prove her worth.”

“Makes sense,” O said. “We’re rapidly approaching another ad break. I don’t suppose we could get any of you to step up to the plate? A demonstration of powers? A neat trick?”

I almost volunteered, but then decided against it. I didn’t want to spend more time in the spotlight.

Annex stood from his chair.

“One of the new members! Excellent!” Jo said. “We’ve got a crash test dummy, a beat up car…”

“I can do something with the car. Maybe we could remodel the exterior?” Annex asked. “Maybe the audience could name a car? What should we make?”

Jo hopped out of her seat, arm raised like a kid in class. She was short. I mentally re-evaluated my estimation of her age to put her closer to her late teens than her early twenties.

A series of beeps, not even a half-second apart, interrupted all of us. Our phones?

I was still drawing my cell from my belt when I saw a commotion backstage. People who’d been standing still were running now, talking into headphones.

My cell phone screen was surrounded by a thick yellow border. A text was displayed in the middle.

Stand by.

Disturbance recorded.

Possible Class S threat.

The others had identical messages on their screens.

There were murmurs among the audience members as someone from backstage stepped up to talk to Koffi and O.

“It can’t be,” Cuff said, her voice quiet.

“We got texts just like this for the incident where we met Weaver,” Tecton said. “It could be a similar situation.”

The lighting changed. Tecton stood from his seat, and I joined the others in following suit.

A studio employee advanced to the front of the stage. When he spoke, the microphone headset he wore carried the sound, “A possible emergency has come up elsewhere in the world. If this blows over in the next few minutes, we’ll edit out anything problematic and resume the show. For now, remain calm while we prepare for an emergency broadcast from the news team upstairs. There is no danger here.”

A little more ominous than the ‘maybe’ the studio employee had given us.

Panel by panel, the backdrop of the ‘Mornings with O, J and Koffi’ set transformed, images flickering to show a composite of a grainy, long-distance shot of a city. It had been taken with a cell phone, and the resolution didn’t translate well with the size of the ‘screen’. There were tall buildings, neon signs glowing in the late evening. Somewhere in Asia.

“Japan,” Wanton said.

The camera was shaking, and the view on the screen reacted in kind.

Dust rose in clouds, billowing, until they obscured the camera’s view.

The audience was reacting. Moans, cries of alarm and despair. They knew what was going on.

“Please be the Simurgh,” Cuff said, her voice small. Grace put an arm around Cuff’s shoulders.

That may be the first time in history anyone’s thought that.

She’s right, too. Even the Simurgh would be better than this.

The timing, the fact that it was happening so soon after Behemoth had died… it was all wrong.

Behemoth had come from deep underground. Leviathan had emerged from the ocean. The Simurgh had approached from the far side of the moon and descended to hover just above the tallest building in Lausanne.

The fourth, it seemed, was appearing in plain sight.

The dust took forever to clear. But for a few mutters here and there, small animal sounds of despair from the audience and studio employees who were watching, the studio had plunged into quiet horror.

It stood somewhere between Leviathan and Behemoth in height, if I ballparked by the number of stories in the adjacent buildings. I waited patiently for the view to clear, revealing more details. Clues, as if there was a solution to what we faced here.

I pegged him as a he before I saw too much else. He was broad, a Buddha in physique, if more feral in appearance. He was as black as night, with something white or silver giving definition around the edges of his various features. He didn’t wear clothes, but he had features somewhere between leaves and fins, with elaborate designs at the edges, curling away from elbows, his wrist, his fingers and around his legs. It made his fingers and toes into claws, and left dangerous looking blades elsewhere. His face was a permanent snarl, frozen in place, his teeth silvery white behind the ebon lips. Tendrils like the whiskers of a catfish marked the corners of his mouth.

All across the exterior of his body, there were gaps, like the gills of a fish, and that brilliant white or silver glimmered from beneath, a stark contrast to the absolute black that marked the rest of him. It made me think of a tiger. And at the center of it all, quite literally, there was a perfect sphere of that same material, a marble or a crystal ball, his body perched on the upper half and his legs attached to the lower half.

Arms extended out to either side, he took a step, almost waddled. He floated as though he were walking on the moon.

“He’s not a fighter,” I murmured.

“No,” Tecton agreed.

“What is he?” Grace asked.

People were fleeing, still in close proximity to the site, evacuating tall buildings. The Endbringer stopped and extended a hand. His arms weren’t long enough to reach around his girth, but his upper body rotated on the sphere that formed his midsection, giving him the freedom of movement needed.

The camera shook as he used his power, and an unseen cameraman had to catch it before it fell. A faint glowing line appeared on the ground, a perfect circle. The light gradually intensified, reaching higher, and the space within the circle seemed to darken in equal measure.

It moved, the circle roaming, the glowing lines adjusting to scale obstacles and account for higher ground and dips in the terrain.

When it intersected a building, the effect became clear. Barely visible with the camera’s range, they were nonetheless a blur, moving within the circle’s perimeter.

“They’re trapped,” Golem said. “He’s manipulating time in there and they’re trapped.”

Golem was right. How many days were they experiencing in there, with only the food they had on hand? Was water reaching them? There didn’t seem to be power.

It took six or seven seconds for the blurring of their movements to slow. In another second, it stopped altogether.

He left his power where it was. The glass on the building’s exterior cracked. Cracks ran along and through the other material, in the street and at the edges of the structure. It leaned, then toppled, and the destruction was contained inside the effect.

All in all, the Endbringer was there for a minute. The effect moved on, and it left a ruined husk of a building behind. Though there was no sun shining, the stone and terrain had been sun bleached, worn by elements, eroded.

The Endbringer extended his hands out to either side, and two more glowing circles appeared. Like the first circle had, they flared with light. Like the first, they moved, drifting counterclockwise around him. It was a slow, lazy rotation, slower than a moving car but faster than someone could hope to run.

He advanced with floating steps, and the circles maintained a perfect, steady distance away from him and from each other, orbiting him like the shadows cast by three invisible moons. Here and there, people and cars were caught inside. He wasn’t a full city block down the street before one circle had a crowd trapped within, half-filling the base of it, another circle perhaps a quarter of the way full.

He moved through a less populated area, and he left trails of skeletons in his wake, in odd fractal patterns that followed the circles’ movements.

He chose what entered and he chose what left. An attack form that couldn’t be defended against, only avoided.

“Movers will be important,” I said. “Maybe shakers too, if we can find a way to stop him or his circles from progressing. His threat level depends on how fast and how much he can move those time-stop areas.”

There was no reply from the others.

I glanced at Cuff, and I saw that she was hugging Grace. She was silent, but tears were running down her face. Grace was more resolute, but her eyes were wet.

The timing, it was wrong.

Strategy, figuring out a battle plan, it was crucial here. The first attacks were often some of the worst for cape casualties, if not necessarily the overall damage done. Too many lives would be lost in finding out his general capabilities.

But it didn’t matter.

I reached out and took Cuff’s hand, holding it. A glance in the other direction showed me Golem. I took his hand too.

This was the key thing in this moment. Not the future, what came next. Support, morale and being a team in the now.

Silent, we watched as the heroes engaged. Eidolon and Legend joined the Japanese heroes in fighting the unnamed Endbringer, keeping a safe distance.

One circle disappeared, and the Endbringer reached out. Defending capes were too slow to escape the perimeter before the effect took hold, a new third circle forming. Eidolon tried hitting the effect with three different powers, but it didn’t break.

“No, no, no…” Cuff whispered.

In a minute, the capes were dead.

Our phones beeped, and I felt a moment’s despair. We’d have to fight this thing.

Ship is outside if you want it, Chicago Wards. Attendence not mandatory.

Temp. codename is Khonsu.

“I’m…” Cuff said, staring down at the phone. “I’m staying.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re going?” she asked.

I nodded.

She nodded back, swallowed hard, before she turned her eyes back to the screen. In that moment, the Endbringer, Khonsu, reversed the direction the circles were drifting, extending the distance they were orbiting around him in the same movement.

Capes who’d been trying to time their advance to close the distance to Khonsu were caught. Four trapped and doomed to die a slow death, a fifth caught between a building and the orb’s perimeter as the circle continued its rotation. When the circle had left the building behind, there was only a bloody smear where the fifth cape had been. Skeletons for the rest.

Now he stood still, weathering attacks with the same durability the other Endbringers had. Damage to his flesh exposed silver, and damage to the belly or other silver parts showed ebon black. The onionlike layers Tattletale had described, plain to see.

I tore my eyes from the screen, marching towards the emergency doors.

So much was wrong with this.

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Fucked on so many levels.

A woman was sobbing in the hallway as we passed. A group of twenty-somethings in dress shirts sprinted down the hallway, carrying bags.

The dragon-craft was waiting for us outside, ramp doors open.

Odd, to see the sky so bright, when the battlefield was shrouded in night.

We stepped inside, entering the center of the craft. I found a seat by a monitor, with a laptop ready and waiting for use, login screen displayed. The monitor was showing the battlefield, roving over the dead, the buildings that had collapsed under the weight of years. Oddly, the cameraman wasn’t focusing on Khonsu or the defending heroes. A few heroes were fleeing, but most weren’t in view.

“We’re ready,” Tecton called out. “Ship?”

The craft hadn’t taken off.

My growing sense of dread was confirmed as the image on the monitors changed.

Even with those circles being as devastating as they are, it wasn’t enough. There wasn’t the same broad scale, the promise of lingering devastation.

No. There was something more to Khonsu.

The monitors showed him in a different city. A caption on the bottom of the screen showed the words ‘Cape Verde’.

He’d teleported halfway around the planet.

All of the problems with getting to Endbringer fights on time, with mobilizing and dealing with the fact that half of our best teleporters and movers had been slain in past battles… he was capitalizing on that weakness.

My phone vibrated to alert me to a new text. I didn’t need to read it to guess what it said. I read it anyways.

Stand by.

“No,” I whispered to myself.

The heroes were engaging, now. Legend and Eidolon had caught up. Khonsu had situated himself near some kind of military installation, and they’d wasted no time in readying for a fight. Missiles and shells exploded around him. The columns of frozen time that rotated around him caught many, and they exploded within the delineated structures.

For long minutes, he fought. I watched, my eyes fixed on the screen, to see his behavior, to look for the cue.

He waded into and through the arranged military squadrons with their parahuman supplementary forces. He was as tough as Behemoth or Leviathan. No attack delivered more than scratches or nicks.

Five minutes, six, as he leisurely tore through the forces he’d caught off guard. Eidolon ducked between two of the pillars of altered time and delivered a punch that sent the Endbringer tumbling. The orbiting columns were pulled behind Khonsu as he moved, and Eidolon came only a hair from being caught.

Alexandria and other capes joined the attack. Too few. Everyone else retreated.

Khonsu didn’t pursue. He remained where he was, arms extended out to either side, palms down.

Then he disappeared in a massive, tightly contained explosion. Trucks and sections of fence were thrown into the air by the movement.

Long seconds passed. Then my phone vibrated. Another text.

Cannot deploy until we have a way to pin him down.

Stand by until further notice.

I struck the laptop that sat in front of me. One hinge holding it in place snapped. I shoved it hard, and it fell to the floor of the craft.

“Fuck!” I shouted. “Fuck it!”

I kicked the fallen laptop, and it went skidding across the floor, down the ramp and into the parking lot. My foot stung with the impacts.

The other Wards were gathered, sitting or standing around the craft that was taking us nowhere. There was no way to approach if he’d teleport by the time we arrived. We’d never catch up to him. The others were as quiet and still as I’d been violent, haunted, scared.

Nobody talked. Nobody volunteered ideas, because we didn’t have any.

I wasn’t sure any of us knew how to fight this one. Nobody in the Chicago Wards did. Nobody elsewhere. Speaking, commenting on the situation, it would only remind us of what we were facing.

Above all else, I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about the detail we hadn’t spoken aloud. The thing, above everything else, that made this so fucked up. In the nine years that we’d been fighting Behemoth, Leviathan and Simurgh, they’d never attacked this close together.

Even if we found a way to beat this Khonsu, to mount a defense and stop him from picking us apart, settlement by settlement, darker possibilities loomed.

Two attacks, two months apart. Had their schedule changed? Would the next attack come in a mere two months, or would it be more unpredictable than that?

No, I thought, with a dawning horror. No, it was worse than that. The Endbringer’s schedule of attack had always depended on the number of Endbringers in the rotation.

If they were keeping to their usual rules, it promised a fifth, waiting in the wings.

Wind stirred the snow that had piled up at the rooftop’s edge. As it entered the space over the Chicago street, city lights caught the flurry and made it almost luminescent, whirling clouds in intense, intricate patterns.

I was, in other words, bored beyond comprehension.

Stakeouts? Not nearly as interesting as they were in the movies. Not even as interesting as they were in the TV shows where nothing happened and the cops complained about how dull things were.

No, this was a special kind of boring, where I was told to limit how much I moved, because of the half-a-percent chance that the targets in the building on the other side of the street might look out a window, and the ensuing one-in-a-thousand chance that they might actually be able to see me perched on the rooftop, surrounded by snow in my dark gray and white costume.

A boring, even, where I wasn’t allowed to read or listen to music.

“Weaver,” the voice came through my earbud.

“Talk to me. Please.”

Grace complied. “Police chief and the Mayor are talking to Revel and the Director. Thought you’d want an update.”

“You could give me minute by minute updates on golf and I’d love you forever.”

“Hyperbole. That’s not like you.”

“It’s been a while,” I muttered. I shifted position to bring my feet up onto my ‘bug box’. The case was insulated, but there was some heat loss, so it included a heater that turned on periodically to maintain a consistent internal temperature. At the same time, I was wearing a PRT issue winter-weather costume beneath a doublethick silk ‘Weaver’ costume, complete with a hood, shawl and something of a skirt. It took time for my fingers and toes to get cold, so things more or less evened out with the heater.

“Well, this is your five minute check-in. Again.” I could hear the noise of a show or something on in the background.

“Thank you, Grace. Situation unchanged. Target’s grabbing a late dinner. There’s seven others working under him. Nothing special in their chatter. There’s plainclothes capes in there, but they’re not using names.”

“You’re sure they’re capes?”

“He warned them when they stepped inside that he’d act the second they used powers, so… yeah.”

“Gotcha. I’ll be in touch in another five min.”

“These five minute check-ins make it so much worse,” I groused. “It’s like, if it weren’t for those, I could let time slip by, but no. I get measured reminders of how long I’ve been here.”

“This was your idea.”

“Dumb idea,” I commented.

“You were the one who wanted to do the stakeout, even,” she reminded me.

“Kind of thought I’d get to read,” I said.

That, and it had been a way to finally get some time to myself. We had run it by the Director, and I’d known right off the bat that he was itching to shut me down. Orders from above, no doubt. A way to get credit with the guys upstairs.

Still, I’d explained how my bugs would let me track the target’s movements. Our boss had okayed the job, with certain restrictions. The surveillance had to be airtight, with the check-ins, a mandate that any breaks had to fall between check-ins, and the restrictions on entertaining myself or drawing attention. At the same time, he’d said with a smile, the PRT rulebook said a Ward couldn’t be forced to undertake or carry out a mission. If I wanted to walk away, I could. If I got too cold I had to.

He wanted me to quit. To exercise a measure of control over me, so he’d have something to leverage against me at a later date.

Six hours in, I’d left for three bathroom breaks, each between four and a half and five minutes in duration, and had relocated three times, as our target went out to lunch and then returned to check on the business. Wanton and Annex had both come to keep me company, until the Director had found something else for them to do.

Then Revel had come on shift, and I had an ally who wasn’t just ready to go to bat for me, but ableto. She was working reduced hours after her head injury, deferring more tasks to Shuffle, but she was still the boss. She’d read the logs from the check-ins, called me to verify facts on the drugs and guns I’d noted moving through the apartment, and then reached out to the Director.

That had been two hours ago. Somewhere in the midst of her battle with the Director, she’d reached out to the police chief and mayor. She would be trying to sell them on our plan.

Or, it was easily possible, they were sold and they were trying to get the ducks in a row and favors pulled to make our plan a reality.

And with all the excitement that was no doubt happening over there, I was sitting here, a little cold, wishing I’d saved a little something from the lunch I’d packed into my plastic Alexandria lunchbox.

The lunchbox was a memento, really, an impulse I’d justified in the moment by telling me it fit with my general camouflage, that it was ironic. I hadn’t counted on how long I’d be left to stare at it, while my bugs tracked the target going about his day. It made for a long time spent ruminating on past events, debating just how the bureaucrats could sabotage me, intentionally or otherwise.

For several dangerous minutes, I’d seriously considered going back to the Undersiders if this mission got derailed. I’d stopped myself before I got too far into that line of thinking, knowing it was a trap that would lead to me compromising, giving up in a way. Playing into the Directors’ hands.

No, I wouldn’t go back. I missed them; scarcely an hour went by where I didn’t wonder how they were getting by, but I wasn’t allowed to contact them. I wanted to know how Imp had changed in response to Regent’s passing, if Grue was getting enough support, or if Rachel was managing in the cold on the other side of the Brockton Bay portal. Was Tattletale using her power too much, still? How was Sierra managing as a corporate magnate and front-man for a villainous organization?

Hell, how was the Boardwalk getting on?

They were questions I couldn’t ask or answer without raising red flags with the people who were watching me for the slightest excuse. I’d cheated and sent letters, written by my bugs, delivered to a mail box while I was hundreds of feet away, and I’d received ‘fan letters’ with coded messages from Tattletale. It wasn’t enough, didn’t have the details I craved.

“Five minute check-in,” Grace said, interrupting my train of thought.

“Situation unchanged,” I replied.

“Stuff’s happening over here. Revel is right beside me. She’ll fill you in.”

I perked up a little at that.

“Weaver. Revel here. I’ve talked it over with everyone that matters and too many people that don’t, and they’re saying it’s okay. Tecton and the rest of the Wards, minus Grace and Wanton, will be mobilizing shortly.”

“We’re good to go?”

“Shortly. PRT trucks are already en route and will be standing by, when they’re not actively transporting your teammates. Campanile, Brazier, Shuffle and Gauss will be a short distance away, but they won’t engage unless this goes belly-up. This is your show. You and the Wards. Quite a few people hoping you guys can pull this off. A handful hoping you fail.”

Like the Directors. “Got it. Do me a favor and fill me in on everyone else’s status and locations until they’re within a twelve-hundred feet of me. Coordination is going to be key here.”

“Grace will handle it.”

Not a hundred percent necessary, but it would keep me sane. I suspected the remaining minutes of waiting would be as bad as the first three hours had been.

“We’re controlling traffic,” Grace said. I could hear others speaking in the background. “Flow through the area should slow and eventually stop.”

“Good to know,” I said. My eyes roved over the face of the building opposite me, while my bugs tracked our quarry.

“Where do you want your team?” Revel asked.

My team?

“Keep them in the vehicles,” I answered. “I’ll let them know where to set up when things are underway.”

I stood up from my perch, making sure that our target and his employees weren’t watching out the windows before I stretched. I was alternately cool and toasty warm, where different body parts had been closer to the vent, and my costume layers thicker. Not cold, though. Not so much that I’d be affected.

Snow slid off the top of my hood as I bent down, lifting the insulated box with my bugs inside and setting it on the roof’s edge. It was essentially a thermos, but as lightweight as the materials were in the case and the heating system, the bugs I’d packed inside made it heavy.

I worried it would be an issue in my plan. With roughly eight hours by myself to think, I’d considered various ways this could go. Tactics our enemies could employ, things that could trip us up, ways our supervisors could derail the plan, but this forty pound box was something that rested entirely on my shoulders.

“We’re close to the perimeter,” Tecton reported, his voice buzzing in my ear.

I pressed a finger to my earbud, “I’m going to get us started. Sound off from all corners, please.”

“Roger from HQ,” Grace said.

“Roger-roger from the field team,” Tecton said. “Just reached perimeter. Sending Annex and Cuff your way. Golem and I will be working.”

I stepped over to the rooftop’s edge. The streets had gone quiet. The unsteady evening traffic that had a way of continuing in the dead of night had stopped, leaving the area more or less isolated. I’d spent the better part of the day organizing bugs in the surrounding buildings, and I now moved them into position. Swarms formed into large ‘x’ marks on major exits, elevators and stairwells. In higher traffic spots where people were more likely to move, I drew out words with the swarm.

‘Cape fight in progress.’

I suspected this was a not-insignificant part of how Revel had managed to get the police chief and mayor on board with the plan, despite any protests or manipulations from the Director. The chance of bystanders getting caught up in this was minimal. As minimal as it was possible to get in the midst of a larger city, anyways.

I activated my flight pack and crossed the street, simultaneously making my way down to the ground. Not so hard, with the extra weight that made up my burden.

The doorway that led into the lobby of the apartment building required a keycard or a number punched into a resident’s phone upstairs. Not so difficult, after a day’s surveillance. My bugs were already prepared to knock a phone off the hook in an older woman’s apartment, a moment after I’d found her name on the board and dialed the number. Much as I’d done in Tagg’s office, I had my bugs punch the buttons.

The door buzzed. I walked backwards into it, carrying the insulated box, then dropped the box in the base of the lobby, opening the little door.

The bugs flowed out of the box and disappeared into the air vents. Slowly, they made their way up to the apartment of a local supervillain. A black market storehouse first, an apartment second, really. The only reason it seemed he slept here was convenience. The old adage of not shitting where one ate fell apart when ninety percent of the day was spent eating.

I knew how easy it was to fall into that trap. I thought of the Boardwalk and felt a trace of nostalgia.

The apartment was one of many detours in an extended distribution chain that saw guns and drugs making their way to the Folk, one of the rare criminal organizations that predated capes and still functioned in more or less the same fashion today. Topsy and his underlings were guarantors, middlemen who made it possible for diehard enemies to do business. If a fight erupted, he and his minions would deal with the situation quickly, promptly and efficiently.

It was a simple job, and it was one he’d done for nearly a decade. In the process, he’d apparently grown exceedingly rich, and he had recently started to become more ambitious. Campanile and Shuffle had interfered with a deal, and Topsy had hired some mercenaries to seek out retaliation. If the escalation of the situation wasn’t bad enough, the mercenaries had crossed lines, and Topsy had been relocated to the heroes’ shit list as a consequence. He was an acceptable target.

The only thing that would make Campanile and Shuffle happier than us fucking up and giving them an excuse to step in would be a perfectly executed operation and a humiliating loss for Topsy. I’d do my best to oblige on that front.

Finding the way through the building’s ventilation system was a question of mapping the system. Once I knew the way, the bugs abandoned the map and made their way into the apartment.

I could have gone on the offensive right away, but this wasn’t a conventional attack. Every step of this had to be considered, measured, and plotted.

Minutes passed as I followed Topsy’s movements through the apartment. One by one, I collected his underling’s phones, as they put them down. A girl in the group said she needed to make a call, couldn’t find her phone, and borrowed one from someone else. The second she put it down and turned her back, cockroaches swept it into the space between the table and the wall, and then proceeded to nudge it well out of reach, beneath furniture.

Topsy’s phone was the only one left, and he wouldn’t put it down long enough for me to claim it. I focused on the front hall instead, bugs collecting around jackets, boots and the winterized costume pieces, complete with warm coverings.

I could sense Annex and Cuff through the bugs that were warm and safe in the folds of their costumes. They trudged through the two inches of snow that had accumulated on the plowed sidewalks. Cuff seemed oddly more comfortable compared to Annex, who clutched his cloak around his shoulders.

“Annex, Cuff, I’m half a block up and to your right,” I said, one finger on my earpiece. “Look for me in the lobby.”

“Got it,” Annex reported.

Back to the preparations. The goal here wasn’t to defeat Topsy, but to break him. Part of the goal, anyways.

Silk lines tangled zippers and bound laces. Gloves, both the ones for costumes and the ones for regular winter wear, were knotted with more silk, or they became home to wasps, cockroaches and millipedes.

Bugs too large or too small to be crushed found their way into boots. Cockroaches bit and chewed at the finer straps that held the inner lining of jackets against the exterior. The bugs I’d laced with capsaicin were relatively few in number due to the fact that it would kill the bugs next to them in the box, but I didn’t need a lot of the stuff. I transferred some to scarves and balaclavas by rubbing their bodies against the fabrics.

Annex knocked on the glass door, then melded into it and passed through before I could approach to open the door. He rubbed at his upper arms as he opened the door for Cuff.

“You okay?” I asked.

Annex only nodded.

There. I snapped my head up to look in the direction of the upstairs apartment, as though I could see through the walls. Topsy had put his phone down on the kitchen counter to grab a beer, setting the thing to speaker mode while he looked for a bottle opener.

Bugs from the front hallway of the apartment flowed into the kitchen and swept the phone into the half-full sink. Topsy didn’t notice right away.

“Creepy when you do that,” Cuff said.

“Hm?”

“Zoning out.”

“I’ve disabled their communications,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I moved the empty box to a corner of the lobby, hidden in plain sight, then led the way out of the building, with Cuff and Tecton following me into the adjacent alleyway.

Topsy was swearing as he nearly dropped his beer in his haste to rush to the sink and push his sleeves up to dig for the smartphone in the mess of dishes and scummy water. I could taste how much old food was in the water. It wasn’t a sense that translated well, but I could detect a thin, strong scent permeating the kitchen, one a select few of my bugs were attracted to.

“Tecton, Grace,” I said, “Annex and Cuff are here, we’re standing aside while I engage. I’m not forcing this. Longer it takes them to catch on, the better the psychological effect.”

“Roger you,” Grace answered.

It was all about thinking a step ahead. I sent bugs into the room with the money and drugs and set them to destroying the plastic bags and eating through the paper bands of money. Wasps and other hostile bugs nestled in the gun cases and around handles. I didn’t have many bugs to spare, so I used the others from the building that I hadn’t deployed to make warning signs for the residents.

All in all, I managed about five or six minutes of quiet, steady destruction before one of the underlings walked in and saw what was happening. I rewarded him by flying two capsaicin-laced insects into his eyes.

“They’re sounding the alarm,” I said. The thug was hollering, and Topsy was shouting something about calling for the reinforcements, directing some swear words at the fact that nobody apparently had a working phone on hand.

That swearing swiftly became a stream of curses aimed at ‘that fucking bug bitch’.

“Annex, inside,” I said.

“Good,” Annex said. “Because I just stepped outside, and now I’m going back in. It’s a pain to move through walls this cold. Sucks the heat out of me.”

“Warm up inside,” I said. “Take your time, but try to move upstairs. Keep your head poked out so you can hear me. I’ll let you know what route they take.”

“Right,” he said, reaching into the wall. “Fuck, that’s cold.”

Then he was gone.

My swarm continued to plague Topsy and his people. I slowly escalated the intensity of the attack, until Topsy gave the order to retreat.

“Get what you can and get the fuck out,” Topsy ordered, “Yeah, you too. I’m paying you, aren’t I? Go find the bitch.”

Not so cheery for a guy with a playful name like ‘Topsy’. Then again, I’d caught him at the end of his work day. By contrast, I’d woken up, donned my costume and started my stakeout. Eight hours, starting at four, watching and following as Topsy and his men conducted their business. He was more tired than I was, and he was both a little drunk and a little high.

It meant he was a little more likely to freak out when their outdoor clothing turned out to be festooned with stinging, biting insects, falling to pieces or too entangled in silk to use.

Once the majority of his underlings were out of the apartment, Topsy leveraged his power, reorienting gravity to shift the boxes and piles of stuff. They hit the wall, slid down the hallway, and finally tumbled through the open front door of the apartment in a heap. With money bands cut and bags chewed open, much of the merchandise in Topsy’s stock was scattered to the wind. My bugs could sense the clouds of powder filling the air. Evidence, if nothing else.

He wasn’t screaming, now, which I found odd. Now that his underlings had gone ahead, he’d settled into a grim and quiet attitude. He turned to the sole remaining underling. “Anything?”

“Too far to see,” the man said.

“Keep looking as we head down.”

Topsy was tricky. Part of the reason for the surveillance had been to identify the other parahumans in his group. He hired mercenaries, paying well, and there was no sure way to tell who he had with him, short of seeing them in costume. Trouble was, his people were defaulting to heavier clothing over their costumes, due to the cold weather. Identities were doubly hard to discern, and Topsy wasn’t one to blab over the phone about who was working for him.

“Annex,” I said, touching my earpiece, “They’re heading for the stairwell. Do what you can, but let them keep moving forward.”

“Got it.”

I sent bugs ahead of the group to check the way. Annex flowed up the stairs to intercept them. Some steps became slopes instead, others had the supports removed, so the stairs collapsed underfoot. Each of Topsy’s underlings fell at some point, their burdens thrown from their arms or crushed beneath them. An unlucky or clumsy few fell more than once.

“Annex,” I said. No use. He was inside the stair’s surface. An unfortunate side effect of his power was the fact that his senses were limited while he was inside an object. He was blind, deaf, and his ability to feel was limited by the material he occupied. He could sense heat as much as the object could hold heat, could sense vibrations as much as the material could receive them.

“Annex,” I tried again.

“I’m here.”

“Back off. They’re catching up to you, and Topsy’s on his way down with an avalanche of stuff.”

“Right.”

I could see Cuff returning. She saw my hand at my ear and didn’t speak, giving me a thumbs up instead.

Annex spoke, his voice low, “Okay. I’ll take a detour, fix the damage I did to the stairs, then rendezvous.”

Very calm. Assured. It wasn’t even something we’d plotted out beforehand, but there was no urgency here, no panic or distress.

Not on our end, anyways.

Topsy’s crew reached the first floor of the basement, which included the parking garage. Topsy followed right after with the piles of goods, abused by their rough tumble down a dozen flights of stairs. The packages of powder virtually floated in the air, with Topsy batting them in the direction of his people.

“Everything with red tape is highest priority,” Topsy said. “Load it into the trucks first. We can take a loss on the rest, pay the fucks back and claim intervention of bug bitch.”

“Two trips,” the man I took to be Topsy’s lieutenant said. “Bug girl can see what her bugs see. She’ll be on our heels.”

I’m not even fifteen paces away, I thought. I’d worried they would exit at the ground floor, but it was safe. I made my way inside to grab my insulated box. Heavy.

The lieutenant continued, “Mockshow, open the garage doors. Get some cold air in here.”

“I’m already freezing,” the girl of the group said. “We left our jackets up there.”

“Don’t fucking care. Bit of cold will deal with these bugs faster than it hurts us. Move.”

Mockshow touched the garage door, and the mechanisms shifted to life. Cold air flooded into the garage. I was forced to pull my bugs back, drawing them into the stairwell and through the vents to the box I held. Only the bugs nestled in the villains’ clothing remained.

I could barely hear as the lieutenant spoke to Mockshow, “See?”

“Bosses are advising we try plan as detailed,” Grace said. “If it fails, orders are to abort.”

And there was our first bit of interference. The Director didn’t want us to succeed. Topsy wasn’t a likable guy, was dangerous in his own way, even, but he was a known quantity. Manageable.

Fuck that, I thought. I didn’t sit in the snow for eight hours, bored to tears, to have this mission end at the first excuse.

I didn’t say it aloud. I focused on what our targets were doing.

The trucks had apparently been loaded up, because the villains were gathering into three vehicles. They peeled out with a squeal both I and my bugs could hear.

No less than ten seconds later, they ran over the chain that Cuff had laid in the snow just past the garage door. She’d reshaped it so spikes jutted out, I knew. I could hear the tires pop, and pieced together the scene from the movements of the people and boxes within the trucks. The second truck had made it halfway across the spike strip losing its front tires, but the collision of the third truck ramming it from behind drove its rear wheels over the strip.

Two of three trucks disabled.

I stayed where I was, letting the last of my bugs finish gathering in the insulated box, then carried it outside to Cuff.

“Spiked chain worked,” I commented, my voice a murmur.

Cuff pumped a fist.

I touched my earpiece. “Two cars disabled and a third trapped behind. They-”

“Watch,” Topsy said, as he climbed out of the truck.

Not a statement. A name. I felt my heart sink a touch. Of all the motherfucking people he could have hired-

“What?” his lieutenant asked.

“They’ve got to be close. Take a second, look for them. Mockshow? Get us moving.”

It didn’t take Watch two seconds to turn and face the alley where Cuff and I were hiding.

“It’s Watch,” I whispered, “They’re on to us. Go.”

Cuff nodded and reached for her left ear. I seized her wrist to stop her.

She gave me a funny look. “Mission’s a bust.”

“Mission is on,” I hissed the words. “Go.”

I lifted the box, as Watch and Topsy made their way up the snow-covered ramp to us, underlings following them. An adjustment of gravity removed the issues the slope posed. Watch was saying something I couldn’t make out over the rush of wind. Something about our location. We didn’t have long.

Watch was a package deal like Grace or Circus. A lot of powers, flexible. His specific powers weren’t on record, but it was fairly well known that he was capable of short bursts of intense, short-ranged clairvoyance. He could see people’s biology, ignore the issues of light, darkness or intervening objects, and he had a limited super speed coupled with what had been dubbed ‘phantom hands’. The ability to reach through people like Shadow Stalker might, targeting particular aspects of people’s body to shred arteries or tear through nerves with his fingers and fingernails.

He was a monster who left his victims dead if they were lucky, quadriplegic if they weren’t. Maybe that was ableist, but I didn’t fancy being left to rely on the care of others for the rest of my natural life, suffering what was, by all accounts, an indescribably painful case of phantom limb.

It said a lot about Topsy and the direction he was taking his enterprise, that he’d hire this bastard.

I nearly dropped the box, slick as it was with the snow that had melted while it sat in the lobby. Cuff helped me catch it. A moment’s delay, but enough time for Topsy, Watch and the others to crest the top of the ramp that led from the basement level to the street.

As we ducked behind cover, taking our steps into the alley, the snow that had accumulated on the ground began to fall in reverse, in thick, wet clumps. I felt the same kind of lift that accompanied a use of my flight pack, and both Cuff and I were lifted off the ground as well.

The weightlessness ceased, and we fell. Only we fell up.

My flight pack kicked to life, and the wings unfolded so I could use the propulsion. I reached for Cuff with one free hand, nearly grabbing one of her braids, but found her wrist instead, felt her hand clasp my wrist in return. Snow and ice pummeled us as it broke free of the sidewalk and flew skyward.

It also, I noted, helped to obscure us. Some gunshots sounded, though we were safe around the corner.

With the flight pack, I managed to steer us towards the fire escape, throwing the box down -or up- and seizing a handhold. I found a grip and started to swing Cuff towards the railing when gravity shifted again. Cuff jerked, and I found myself half-folded over the railing, trying to keep her from falling through the open mouth of the alley and into Topsy and Watch’s sights.

Her legs dangled towards the street we’d just left, and I couldn’t muster the upper body strength to lift her. Worse, her grip was too tenuous for her to risk letting go to climb up my arms and shoulders and reach safety. Her right arm still wasn’t as strong as it should be.

The arms of my flight pack reached out to try and grip Cuff, but the angles of our bodies didn’t offer anything substantial to grab. Her braids? No. Nothing on her costume either.

The chain looped around her back? Yes.

“Chain,” I gasped the word in the moment her gauntlet slid from my grip. The insectile arm at the side of my flight suit snagged the chain and passed it to my hand in a sudden, jerky motion. She caught the lower half of the loop and jolted to a stop, her lower body dangling out in sight of Topsy and his men.

They opened fire, and Cuff shrieked in alarm.

Not quite so calm, leisurely and confident, now. Damn it.

Still, we managed to reel her in, her climbing, me hauling the chain in, inch by agonizing inch. The men with the guns rounded the corner, still shooting, as they kept out of the way of Topsy’s power. I had to duck low to take some cover behind the insulated metal box and the metal slats of the fire escape. More bullets ricocheted off of Cuff’s armor.

“Not in danger?” Cuff practically snarled the question at me. It was out of character for her, but that was excusable considering she’d just been shot at.

“You’re bulletproof. I’m bulletproof, even. Between the new Darwin’s bark spider silk costumes, and your armor, you were safe.”

As if punctuating my statement, a gun went off below, making the railing sing with the impact.

“Annex,” I said, communicating using the earpiece. “I can sense your location. Climb two stories and give me an exit on the north face of the building.”

“Which way is north?”

“Your left.”

“Gotcha.”

“The way you worded that…” Cuff said.

“You’re not coming with,” I told her.

Gravity shifted again. Our backs slammed against the side of the building, the two of us grunting in unison. My metal box scraped against the metal of the fire escape to land beside me. We were now more or less lying down on the building’s face.

Watch and Topsy’s men were making their way along the side of the building, walking on it.

I pulled off my flight pack and handed it to Cuff.

“I don’t know how to fly this,” she said.

“I’ll fly it,” I told her. I noted the hole Annex was making. “Go over the top of the building to the roof. Fall. It’ll take you out of range of Topsy’s power, you’ll be returned to a normal orientation. Drop again, off the other side of the building, sneak around and stop Mockshow. If she gets the group moving, we won’t be able to intercept and carry out the plan.”

“We’re supposed to report if we run into trouble, cancel the mission. This is a lot of trouble.”

“Trust me,” I told her. “Please. Go fast, before Watch catches up.”

She nodded, and I gave her a boost with the flight pack to move her along as I dropped into Annex’s hole. I made it ten feet into the hallway before getting out of range of Topsy’s power and skidding to a halt on the carpeted floor.

Cuff sprinted for the ledge that was the rooftop. She fell only three or so feet before gravity reasserted itself, driving her into the snow and gravel.

I noted Mock, but I couldn’t see much of what she was doing. Her power, though, put her in the same general category as Rachel. She empowered minions. They even fit into the same general weight class as Rachel’s dogs. The difference, though, was that they were inanimate. Loose, telekinetically animated servants, typically with the size, clout and general strategy of a grown rhino. Charge things, hit them hard, repeat.

I had no doubt she’d be working on the truck. Maybe multiple trucks. Bugs were still inside the vehicles, and I could sense things shifting and lurching as she reconfigured it into a more or less mobile form.

Watch was suffering with both the winter weather and his lack of proper footwear. He was fast, but the terrain was slowing him. Ice and snow had been thrown against the side of the building by Topsy’s power, and every other step threatened to send Watch tumbling. His super speed wouldn’t help him much when he had to plot his movements like this, but it still made him incredibly dangerous if he did get one of us in reach.

He crested the top of the building as Cuff reached the other side of the roof and jumped down.

Propulsion and antigravity together weren’t enough to slow her fall. A miscalculation. She was too heavy, with her armor.

I promised myself I’d owe her one and slowed her the only way I could – I used the flight pack to push her against the side of the building, using friction and drag to slow the fall.

She hit the alley on the far side of the building at a speed that was probably too fast to be comfortable, not so fast she was gravely hurt. I used the propulsion in the flight pack’s wings to help speed her along as she stumbled, jogged, then sprinted towards the front of the apartment building.

Cuff rounded the corner just as Mockshow led her quadruped truck-minion outside. I folded the wings in just as she made contact.

Cuff could use her short range metallokinesis to manipulate her armor, effectively granting herself increased strength. She could, it seemed, also use it to impact the metal she was hitting. She wasn’t moving that fast, but everything my limited senses could tell me suggested she delivered a hit like a freight train striking a car that had stalled on the tracks.

“No! Fuck no, fuck damn!” Mockshow shouted.

Cuff threw out a chain with an audible clatter, then caught the end, moving like she was winding it around the villain. She reconsidered as Topsy and his minions reacted to the noise of the collision and came after her. She was nearly at the far end of the street when Topsy used his power. He reoriented gravity, and she veered to one side, striking the wall beside the alleyway rather than disappearing inside. The tilt continued, and she turned away, moving with the tilt.

He leveraged his power further, only this time, it was his namesake topsy-turvy ‘up is down’ variant. It was his most offensive power, the ability to hurl large numbers of people or objects into the city’s skyline, then revoke his power to let them fall.

Cuff, to her credit, was ready. I could sense her catching ahold of the building’s face, using the cover of the rising snow around her to climb up and disappear into the alley.

“Status, Weaver?” Grace’s voice came over the channel.

“All kosher,” I replied, managing to sound calm. I walked to the far end of the hall and turned a corner, until I stood by a window with a view of the villains. “Waiting to see which way they go, so sit tight, Golem and Tecton.”

“Fuck,” Topsy was saying, as he approached the wreckage. Mockshow was using her power to animate the chain and help herself out of it.

“What the hell was that?” Mockshow asked.

“Wards. … this, it’s a trap,” Watch said. He’d made his way back down the side of the building, where Topsy’s power had oriented gravity at a right angle. He was calm as he spoke, “They shut down this … area, and they’re making …cal strikes to disable us. Even the fact that …show here doesn’t have a … and I’m wearing sneakers instead of boots, they wanted that. They want us unprepared, angry, even cold.”

“I’m paying you to get me out of this kind of situation,” Topsy said. “Do your job. How do we handle this?”

He reached for Mockshow, and she slapped his hand away. He caught her wrist, simultaneously capturing her arm and blocking the path of the cockroach I’d hidden in between her sweatshirt and her jacket. He plucked it out.

“Ew! Ew, ew!”

With a systematic, accurate and patient series of movements, Watch began catching and killing every single one of my bugs. Slowly but surely, I was being rendered blind and deaf. It would make tracking a great deal harder.

“Cuff,” I communicated over the earbud, “Let me have the flight pack.”

Dutifully, she unhitched the harness and let me pilot the thing back in my general direction. Annex and I made our way outdoors, back to the fire escape, as Watch killed the last bugs.

“Revel,” I said. “We won’t get close to him. Promise. I’ve been on the team for six months, I’ve shown you guys I can play nice, play safe, avoid making trouble. But you guys brought me on board to be the shot caller in the field, with Tecton as the leader. Let me do what I’m supposed to do and call the shots. It’ll be a win for the good guys, I promise.”

There was a long pause. I’m up against Revel and the Director, now. My advocate had switched stances.

I took flight again to maintain a good distance. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe Watch had briefly turned my way.

He knew I was following, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had a plan. Maybe more than one.

They wasted no time in putting it into action. Topsy used his power over a wide area, reversing gravity’s effect. Snow began to fly in the air, and was soon joined by a pair of cars. They reached the top of Topsy’s effect, caught between the two gravities, and began to rotate aimlessly in the weightless middle-ground between normal gravity and the area Topsy had altered.

Then he shifted gravity’s direction again. An attack, such as it was. The snow and cars fell in my direction. Were flung, for lack of a better term. I flew for cover, ungainly as I raised the insulated box as a shield, snow and ice slamming into the buildings around me, pinging off of the metal. I managed to duck out of sight. The cars, for their part, were only thrown into the street a block away.

It wasn’t an attack he’d aimed, but a scattershot approach, meant to scare, to allow the possibility that he’d get lucky.

And it had given them the chance to try and slip away. A few minutes, while I recouped and tried to get my sights on them in the midst of the stirring snow and limited visibility.

“Okay,” Revel said. “Only because we can’t move the Protectorate heroes there fast enough. You are not to engage.”

“Roger,” I reported, my relief mixed with a frustration that the go-ahead had come so late.

Their attempt to occupy me and break away might have worked, if it weren’t for Golem and Tecton. The villains had come to a complete stop as they reached the barrier. A row of asphalt and concrete hands, the gaps filled by Tecton’s power. The wall was as tall as the buildings on either side of it, spanning the breadth of the street.

Topsy began to use his power, moving snow at the far left of the wall, no doubt intending to scale the structure, move over the wall. Watch stopped him.

They turned to run instead, moving parallel with the wall.

Watch, I guessed, had seen Tecton, Golem, and the two PRT trucks on the other side of the wall, ready to spray the villains with containment foam.

By the time Topsy and his crew reached the next street over, the PRT van had pulled to a stop. Golem was outside the vehicle, creating another barrier. The implication was clear. Every escape route would be cut off.

This was a battle of attrition, a patient fight, with civilians kept out of reach. We’d let them get tired, frustrated, cold, and we’d break their spirits.

The goal here wasn’t just to win. It was to win so irrevocably that we took the fight out of them altogether, left them without any hope that they could win the next time.

Topsy hit Golem and the truck with flipped gravity. Both moved, but neither lifted off the ground. Even before he started raising the wall, Golem would have used his power to hold his feet against the ground, to grab the truck’s axle. Tecton would be waiting inside, ready to leap out and break the hands if necessary.

The villains could have continued. In their shoes, I might have. It made sense, to force Tecton and Golem to stop and start until an opening presented itself.

Except they were cold, tired, and being countered at every turn was starting to take a psychological toll.

They might have split up, scattered, but they didn’t. Again, they suspected a counterplan. Which we did have. Golem and Tecton could have tripped up the most problematic combatants while the rest of us picked off the weakest members one by one. I didn’t have bugs, but I could fly, and I had coiled lassos of silk cord that I could use in a pinch, along with a taser that I could use if I wanted to end things sooner than later. A good attack from above, I could manage. If they went inside, I could unload the bugs I had in my insulated box.

They had a different plan in mind. They reversed direction and headed straight for a restaurant with a sign showing a gold dragon against a red background.

“Grace,” I said. “Wei shu wu? Does typing it into the computer turn up anything?”

“A cover business for a group with affiliations to the Folk,” Revel volunteered.

“We safe to harass them, or-”

“No. They have people with powers, and that’s beyond the scope of this manhunt.”

“Can you find the number at the building? A restaurant, Wei shu wu.”

“Weaver,” Revel said, her tone a warning.

“Please,” I said, as the villains disappeared inside.

Revel only sighed.

A moment later, the phone rang, and I could hear a voice.

“Wei shu wu dining. Would you like delivery? We can also arrange reservations if needed.”

“We would, if it’s no trouble,” I said, hoping I was connected. “Eight criminals just entered your restaurant on Addison. They’re cold, bedraggled, a little desperate. It’s an ugly situation, and I’m sorry for the trouble that’s found its way to your doorstep.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Playing dumb?

“It was trouble they started,” I said. “They crossed lines, and now that we’re coming after them, they’ve come running to your place for shelter.”

“We can hardly offer anyone shelter.”

“I know,” I said. “But call your boss, if you need to. Let them know that the heroes aren’t going to start a fight, but the villains inside the building need to leave and get taken into custody. If this goes any further, we’re not going to press you, but it’s going to draw attention. People will wonder why the bad guys are hiding there.”

“Weaver,” it was a man’s voice this time, over the comms. “You don’t have the authority to make promises or offers.”

“We can’t make them leave,” the man from the restaurant said, his voice a whisper. “We don’t have ability to make threats.”

Because you’re hapless restaurant owners or because your gang doesn’t have the clout there to go head to head with Topsy?

“Don’t hang up the phone,” I said, “Use your cell phones, talk to anyone you can think of that might help. Bosses, franchise owners, whoever. Fill them in. Let them know that the guests in your store include men called Topsy and Watch. If they ask who I am, you tell them I’m a superhero called Weaver.”

“From the video?”

“From the video,” I said.

His tone changed, as if he’d shifted mental gears, at that. He sounded vaguely plaintive. “You’re talking as if my boss is an important man, but-”

“You’re just a restaurant employee,” I said. “I understand. Call whoever. We’ll figure this out together.”

There was a muffled sound, as if he was covering the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.

“You’re talking as if you’re on the same side,” the man said. The Director, I was pretty sure.

“Weaver,” Revel chimed in, sounding annoyed.

“Mute me so he doesn’t hear?” I asked.

“Already done,” Revel said. “This isn’t the way we should do this.”

I bit my lip. I wanted to retort, to argue, but I knew there were too many listening ears.

This is exactly what we should be doing.

“They’re people,” I said. “They’re bad guys, maybe, but they’re all people. Topsy and Watch and Mockshow want the same things we do, to be safe, warm, dry and well rested, and we’re taking that away from them. And the people who work with this restaurant? They don’t want to deal with people like Topsy and Watch. All we have to do to resolve this is make it easier to deal with us than to deal with the other villains.”

“We shouldn’t be dealing with them, period,” the Director said.

“We-” I started to reply, then I stopped.

Topsy, Watch and Mockshow had stepped from the building.

“They just decided to leave,” the restaurant employee said. His voice shook a little.

I could see the body language of the three villains and their henchmen. Topsy kicked the window at the outside of the restaurant, and a crack appeared in it. He shouted something I couldn’t make out from my vantage point.

I’m sure they did, I thought. But I only said. “Thank you for cooperating.”

“Thank you for talking me through this,” the man said.

With that, he hung up.

Something had gone on that I hadn’t overheard. An exchange of words, a message from the Folk?

It didn’t matter right now. I watched as the villains made their way down the street, then broke into a store to find shelter from the cold.

It was over. I could read it in their body language. As much as the Director had wanted to wear me down, to have me sit in the cold with nothing to occupy myself with but the five minute check-ins, we’d achieved the same thing against the villains, and we’d been successful in doing it. This was only residual stubbornness.

My arms were stiff with the weight of my bug box. I was glad to set down on the roof and deploy the bugs, flooding the building and driving the villains out into the elements. They had winter clothing they’d stolen, but it wasn’t enough to restore the warmth they’d already lost.

By the time they found more shelter, Annex and Cuff had met up with a PRT van and been delivered to the scene. Annex approached from behind, slithering close, and then used his power to open up a closed storefront, allowing cold to pour into the building’s interior.

This time, when the villains emerged, they did so with arms raised in surrender.

“We did it,” I muttered.

“Be wary of Watch,” Revel said. “Containment foam him first, then move him to a truck. Good job, Wards.”

■

I watched Mockshow on the monitors. She was young. Well, young was relative. She was fourteen or so, and now that she had her costume with her, she wore a hard mask sporting a stylized smiley-face, a headband with screws sticking out like antennae. She’d lost the outdoor clothing and had donned her mask, as if it were a shield between her and us.

I glanced over at our superiors. Revel was in a discussion with the Director, the Mayor and the police chief.

Mockshow’s eyes widened as she saw the bugs filtering into the interrogation room. The tables and chairs had been removed to deny her anything solid enough to use her power on, so she had nothing to hide behind as they began forming into a mass.

“Aw hell no,” she said, as she backed into a corner. “No, no, no, no…”

They gathered into a rough humanoid shape. My shape. A swarm-clone.

“No!” she shouted, as if her refusal to accept it could banish the thing from existence.

“Let’s chat,” I communicated through the swarm. “Off the record.“

“Screw you! Driving me out into the cold, fucking with us without a fair fight? Go die in a fire!”

“I’ve been in a lot of fights,” I commented, “Rare to have one that’s actually fair. Most are pretty brutally one sided.“

“Do you not hear me? Screw yourself!”

The swarm advanced a little, and she shrunk back.

“Paradigm is changing, Mockshow. I want to make that clear, so you know what people are talking about when they offer you deals. People aren’t going to be inclined to play nice.”

“Nice?”

“The three strike rule, cowboys and indians, counting coup…“

“You’re cracked. The fuck are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter. Things are shifting. People are relaxing when they shouldn’t be, because Behemoth died, and-“

“Pat yourself on the back more, why don’t you? I saw that video.”

Everyone did, I thought.

I couldn’t let her get me off topic. “I’m going to tell you what I would’ve wanted to hear if I found myself in your shoes, at this point in time.“

“Oh, so generous.”

“There’s two groups of people. There’s the people who’re preparing for the end of the world, who are on pins and needles waiting to see just what hits us next, how the dynamic’s going to change. I’m in that group, understand? In my book, in our book, anyone who isn’t keeping the peace and isn’t helping doesn’t deserve any mercy. They’re detriments. You’re dangerously close to falling into that category.”

“Whatever.”

“And the other group? They’re the people who’ve finally found a glimmer of hope, and they’re relaxing, thinking maybe we can take out the remaining Endbringers, maybe the world can go back to normal.“

She snorted.

“Yeah. Exactly,” I said. I glanced at the others. The Director wasn’t participating in the conversation anymore. He was staring at a monitor, but his reaction didn’t suggest he was watching me interact with Mock.

Either way, I had to wrap it up. “But those guys? They aren’t on your side either. Once upon a time, they’d be the same people who’d push for people like you to go free. Because maybe you’d help somewhere down the road. Now? They have no reason to give you that slack. You’ve got no help here, and I think you’ll be surprised at how hard they come after you.”

“I didn’t do shit. I’ve barely had my powers a month.”

“You signed up with Topsy. With Watch. This is as much about them as it is about you. Making Topsy uncomfortable, denying him a resource they’d just acquired. Stripping away his conveniences, leaving him wondering if you’ll plea out.”

“Fuck that. I’m good. Not saying a word.”

“Probably,” I said. “But take it from someone who’s been there. You don’t want to go down this road. The heroes will come after you hard, the villains will never trust you. Honestly? I don’t care if you stay a villain or become a hero. But it’s not worth it to be a villain and stick with guys like Topsy. The gains aren’t worth what it costs you.”

“I turn traitor and walk away, I’m fucked.”

“Join the Wards,” I suggested.

I experienced a momentary flashback to my first night out in costume, talking to Armsmaster.

Holy shit, have I become him?Pursuing my agenda, offering the options I know she won’t take, steering her towards my self-serving goal?

It chilled me, bothered me far, far more than Mockshow’s snort of derision.

“Or go be a scumbag, but be a scumbag who helps save the world,” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Us or them, Mockshow,” I told her. “Saving the world or getting in the way. If you’re helping, we pull our punches, the charges don’t stick, whatever. You get in the way, well, every night can be like tonight was.”

She scowled.

“That’s all.”

“Fucking rich. You’re just pushing me to go join your old team.”

“I’m suggesting that you consider your options. Pay fucking attention to where you’re going. I wish I had. That’s all. If you want to contact me, that door will be left open. I’ll pull strings to make sure of it.”

“I gotcha,” she said. Her shoulders slumped a little, as if in defeat. She glanced up at me, and I could see a glimmer of vulnerability in her expression. “Weaver?”

“What?”

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“Yes. Of course.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. She stuck her hands in her pockets, then glanced at the windows, which were partially obscured with half-closed blinds.

I felt my hair stand on end as the Director approached. I’d always felt a little caught off guard by him. He looked more like a classic politician than the generals and soldiers I was used to associating with the PRT, with dimples, styled sandy hair and a tidy suit. His demeanor, body language, everything, it was warm. That warmth didn’t reach his eyes. Not when he’d looked at me. Especially not right now.

He’d seen the swarm-clone in the interrogation room. I knew it.

For long seconds, we stared at each other. I’d thought he would say something, but he didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said, “For playing ball.”

“I didn’t.”

“You could have made that harder.”

“Making it harder would have done more harm than good,” he said. “I’ve still got two teams to run, a specialized police force to organize.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Mockshow. Was she receptive?”

I shook my head, but I said, “Maybe. Maybe something will sink in.”

“Teenagers have a way of being bullheaded,” the Director said. “Villains too. Teenaged villains? Well.”

His eyes didn’t move one iota away from me as he said it. It left no question about how he’d compartmentalized me in his head.

“I suppose you’re right,” I said.

“Having Topsy off the streets is going to be a feather in a few caps, I think,” he said. “It’s messy to credit you.”

“I really don’t care,” I said. “I just want to make some steps forward in this mess. Prepare for the worst.”

He studied me in a very slow, careful way, as though taking everything in. Assessing the target.

“I could raise an issue with you being in that interrogation room.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It’d look obvious, that you were coming after me. I didn’t say anything really problematic. But it’s an option.”

“You withheld details.”

“It’s kind of crazy out there, in the midst of a fight. You lose track of stuff.”

“I know,” he said. “I used to be a soldier.”

That caught me off guard. He didn’t look like he’d ever been in a fight, let alone a war. He was so young, too.

“You haven’t been a cape for long,” he said.

“A year.”

“A year. But you’ve been through a lot. I’d hope you were better about minding those details.”

A slap in the face, not calling me out on the fib, but turning it against me.

He seemed content with that for the moment. He didn’t press the offensive. I didn’t either.

“We both got what we wanted tonight,” I said. “It’s a win, isn’t it?”

He didn’t reply, glancing at the Mayor. The man seemed happy as he talked to Revel and the police chief. Not giddy, but happy.

“Is this going to let up?” I asked. “Or are we going to be fighting each other constantly?”

The Director glanced at me. “You want this to stop?”

“It’s a waste of energy. There can’t be compromise?”

He didn’t even have to think about it. He shook his head, briefly pursing his lips. “No compromise.”

I clenched my fist. Damn him.

“A balance,” he said. “Maybe a balance.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I think,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “That a compromise would be disastrous. You’re not going to be confined. You showed that in the interrogation room in Brockton Bay, when you murdered Director James Tagg and Alexandria. You’re not going to be confined by law. I haven’t seen a single case where you’ve followed the rules that were outlined for you. Boundaries don’t work, in any sense. If we reached a compromise, worked out some kind of a deal, you’d find a way around it, extending your influence.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“It’s reality. It’s a horrible waste of energy, a tragedy, really, but I’m forced to dedicate time to reining you in, controlling you, keeping you in check. If that results in nights like tonight, we have a balance. Hardly a compromise, but we’ll manage.”

“I suppose we’ll have to,” I said.

“I’d tell you to avoid leaking the fact that you played a major role in tonight’s events, but we both know you wouldn’t listen,” he said. “I’d threaten punishment, but you’d do what you wanted and even enjoy it, feeling vindicated. So we’ll go another route. If you don’t play ball and let us share this narrative the way we need to, I punish the other Chicago Wards. Inconvenient shifts, extra volunteer work, more paperwork.”

“Good,” he said. He flashed me a smile. White capped teeth. “Good. Then this is ideal. We may not have a compromise, but a consensus? It’ll do.”

“It’ll do,” I said.

“Just do me a favor? Try not to murder me like you did the other three Directors.” He winked.

It was a jibe, a verbal thrust, delivered with humor and offhandedness, but it struck home, stirred ugly feelings.

He turned to rejoin the others. The Mayor looked at me, and Revel waved me over. I knew the Director wouldn’t want me to, so I walked over with confidence, my head held high.

“Eight hours?” the Mayor asked. “Sitting in the cold?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is that even legal?”

The Director stepped in, “It wasn’t on the clock. For all intents and purposes, she wanted to take the day off, have some time by herself. We had the tracking device monitored by GPS, so we knew she wasn’t going anywhere she shouldn’t. Being the workaholic she is, she wanted to get intel while she had her alone time.”

I didn’t argue the point. He wasn’t wrong. That was how it was going down in the paperwork. Part of the deal we’d arranged to get this off the ground.

The mayor smiled. “Well, good to see our most controversial member is doing her part. You should smile more. Can we get a smile out of you?”

I smiled a little.

“Better, better! You do bide your time, then make a big splash, don’t you, Ms. Weaver?”

He was managing to sound a little condescending, which was at odds with the events he was alluding to. How did one make me sound so diminutive when making vague reference to the death of an Endbringer, to the murder of Alexandria and the takeover of a city?

I didn’t mention it. I had my pride, but it wasn’t something worth fighting over. I wanted to pick my battles, and any moment now-

“Hopefully we’ll see more of the same from you in the future,” the Mayor said.

The Director started to speak, deflecting, but I cut in. “Actually-“

Eyes fell on me.

Picking my battles. If the Director wanted this to be a war, if he thought I needed to be tempered by an opposing force, then I was game.

I glanced at the Mayor. “Tecton went over it with me, we’ve got more plans like we had for tonight. If you guys are willing.”

The moment the Mayor wasn’t looking, the Director shot me a glance, a dangerous, warning look.

I told you, I thought. My priorities are elsewhere.

“How soon?” the police chief asked. Her stare was hard, judgmental, but there was curiosity in her tone.

“The sooner the better,” I said. “Before they catch on about what we’re doing and adjust. I think I know where a few possible major players are situated. I’ve spent the past few months looking for them. I gathered the intel in my spare time, on my morning runs and patrols. Just like Director Hearthrow was saying. I’m a bit of a workaholic.”

“Like, two weeks?” she asked.

“Give me a day to recuperate, maybe two days if the other Wards need it, I’d be down for another. We could potentially hit seven or eight major targets in the next two weeks, if you wanted. Each of them would be major targets, villains who aren’t playing along, who are more trouble than they’re worth.”

The Director shook his head. “I think that may be extreme. The resources expended, funding-“

“Funding can be conjured up for a project like this,” the Mayor said. “Imagine the impact. Can we do this with the Protectorate team as well? Switch off with the minors?”

“It’s a good idea,” Revel commented. “Weaver’s capable of handling her own in high pressure situations, but the other team members might not be. They have school, family, other concerns.”

“I agree,” I chimed in. “Makes sense. We could have the bad guys reeling.”

“We can’t set our hopes too high,” the Director warned. He gave me another dirty look.

The Mayor chuckled. “No. Of course not. But the impact. And to do it with so little risk? They barely interacted with the villains, by all accounts. It would be insane to pass up the opportunity.”

“Insane,” Revel said, her tone flat. I couldn’t read her feelings on this. I hoped I hadn’t provoked her as much as I had the Director.

“If you’re willing to allow me to suggest some targets,” the police chief said, “I think I could adjust shifts, ensure we have enough squad members to limit or stop traffic inside potential sites of conflict.”

It was consent, in the form of a negotiation. The mayor and police chief were interested, Revel was probably on board. The Director would be forced to play along.

It was done. I was all set to hit the ground running, like Glenn had recommended. Big moves. Actions with momentum. Here on out, I’d have to keep moving so they couldn’t get me.

And hopefully, in the midst of this, we’d be able to organize things for our potential end of the world scenario. Eliminate the obstacles, big and small, train up the rank and file troops.

If anyone thought I was cleaning up Chicago, they were wrong. Like the Director had said, I’d take as much rein as they gave me, use all of the leverage and momentum I could get my hands on. Topsy was a small fry in the grand scheme of things. A test run. I wanted to hit big targets in other cities. To get as many Mockshows into the interrogation rooms as possible, to play the odds and increase the chances that we could get those people on the fence and make sure they were positioned appropriately.